Scenes from Isolation by Cathy Guisewite
My rating: 4/5 cats
look, i never expected i’d ever be reading a Cathy book, either. when i was a little kid hunched over the sunday funnies eating my smurfberry crunch, i’d read the strip because it was there, and i’m a diehard completist; cover-to-covering the comics sections of the TWO papers we got at the home, but the whole “ack, weight gain” and “ack, relationship woes!” content-cycle didn’t really speak to my personal life experience at the time, so it was very much a scan-and-move-on kinda thing.
but in 2020, connor got stuck back in his missouri hometown during lockdown, and started reading his local paper’s comics pages again, and—becoming even more connor-y in the cabin fever of it all, got a little obsessed with chronicling how various comics were addressing (or not addressing) covid.
(as they say, thread)
somehow he stumbled upon cathy guisewite’s insta, discovering that not only had she adapted her daily strip into a series of single-panel comics that were actually reflecting what was happening in the world, but that they were funny and comforting and relatable.
by the time the comics were published in book-form, he was back here where he belongs and he had me pick up a copy for him. skeptical, but curious as a kitten, i read it myself before handing it over, and i gotta admit—this is some highly relatable content and apparently, the pandemic has made me more Cathy-like than i ever dreamed i would be back in the days of colorful sugarmilk-and-honey, particularly in the realms of covid-era attention span:
lofty ambitions vs. executable reality:
and comfort/anxiety eating:
i think we’re all a little bit cathy now, but here’s a test to see.* have u had this reaction to any media in the past two years?
i sure have.
anyway, i hope you have enjoyed this story of me and Cathy 2021—a tale of growth and transformation.
* this test will not work on “covid is a hoax”-ers, or unvaccinated sociopaths who care more about small inconveniences to daily life than not killing someone’s grandma. y’all motherfuckers don’t deserve Cathy. <– welcome to a sentence i never thought i’d type.
read my book reviews on goodreads
