Rachael House’s comic strip from April 2020 went viral.

Pandemic artists read their work

On Tuesday 3 August, the De La Warr Pavilion is holding an online reading of comic strips chronicling the last sixteen months of life under Covid restrictions. Erica Smith recommends signing up and listening in to Rachael House and friends. 

When Rachael House drew the above comic strip in early April last year, she had no idea that when she posted it to Instagram her comment on ‘The Virus” would go viral. She continued documenting the pandemic – as a way to stay sane in insane times.

Whilst Rachael was channelling her rage, frustration and grief into succinct four-panel strips, I was writing a daily blog on a roll of toilet paper and other cartoonists around the world were finding their own ways to make sense of the global pandemic.

Tuesday night’s online event is an opportunity to see and hear the work of Rachael House and six other comic artists with diverse drawing styles – and lifestyles. Rachael will be joined by Jess Hannar, Candy Guard, Holly Casio, Monique Jackson, Natasha Natarajan and Rob Bidder. Combined, their sequential drawings and comics cover class, race, unions, fat politics, having long covid, queer politics, disability and more, as well as ways the pandemic has impacted on them and others. Their observations are rich, funny, angry and compassionate.

Rachael’s four-panel strips have now been published in a beautiful hard-backed book called Resistance Sustenance Protection. It’s available at various independent book shops, including the De La Warr Pavilion shop, and is available to order . It was self-published and made possible with funding from Arts Council England Lottery Fund and Metal Peterborough.

I would highly recommend watching this if you are an artist, illustrator, queer, transgressive or just plain angry about politics and need something to put a wry smile back on your face.

Tickets for Drawn Out can be booked in advance via the DLWP website. There is a sliding scale from £0–£5. The online event is at 7pm on Tuesday 3 August.

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