8/11/2023 0 Comments Grim reaper cartoon 1980![]() ![]() "It's often represented as a figure for an insidious foreign invader working its way into every element of society," Gardner says. He saw freighted images, such as the octopus, standing in for China - which, he says, was also used by Nazi cartoonists to represent Jews back in the 1920s and '30s. It's a challenge for contemporary cartoonists to work against conventions so deeply embedded in the medium, and at the beginning of the current coronavirus pandemic, Gardner says he observed even mainstream political cartoonists using offensive stereotypes in their comics about the virus' first outbreak in China. "Usually, in the racist imaginary of the times, some sort of Mexican sombrero." "You'll often have a mosquito dressed up in a kind of toreador's cape, with what the cartoonist is imagining as a Spanish hat," Gardner says, with an audible grimace. For example, during the great flu pandemic of 1918, he says, people wrongly thought the disease was spread by mosquitoes, and that's reflected in the era's cartoons - with an ugly xenophobic twist. "Racism and xenophobia are deep in the genome of comics and cartooning," Gardner acknowledges. Many of these diseases - especially cholera, which circulated through the public pumps in housing tenements in London - had devastating effects on the poor and therefore, the victims became scapegoated as the source of the disease." "Because of course the poor were often the predominant victims. ![]() "A poor child," he says, pointing to a Victorian-era cartoon from the British magazine Punch. "Like little dogs biting our feet for gout, for example."Įven after germ theory began to change our understanding of what diseases literally looked like, Gardner says, illness and epidemics were often represented through depictions of the people who were most vulnerable to it. "A lot of the early anthropomorphizations are less about disease and more about pain," he explains. He curated a recent exhibition on the topic called Drawing Blood. He's a professor of popular culture at the Ohio State University with an interest in medical humanities and cartoons. "Little figures of demons that were physically attacking the body," offers Jared Gardner. ![]() So they used representations of illness and death that made sense at the time, such as the Grim Reaper. It was invisible, supernatural, terrifying. That means, she says, that cartoons of the virus are somewhat accurate, at least compared to the ways we pictured diseases in the past.īack when we first started imagining disease visually, people didn't even really know what disease was. "What's been remarkable about Covid-19 is from the beginning, we had a visual of the pathogen," says MK Czerwiec, a nurse, artist and scholar of cartoons and health. Which seems to make the coronavirus unique in our long history of anthropomorphizing diseases. That's how cartoonists and animators are anthropomorphizing Covid-19. The post received more than 30,000 points (95% upvoted) and 325 comments (shown below).Picture an angry little ball, covered in spikes, perhaps equipped with arms and legs, and definitely an evil grin. Several months later, Redditor Fingolf645 posted a variation featuring Will Smith and references to 2019's Aladdin and the YouTube Rewind video. The post received more than 120 retweets and 1,000 likes in less than six months (shown below, right). On October 18th, 2018, Twitter user posted a variation using characters from the video game Fortnite. The post received more than 230 points (96% upvoted) and 10 comments (shown below, center). On April 29th, 2014, Redditor ado90 posted a variation featuring the soccer player Sergio Ramos. On September 3rd, 2013, the blog 1389blog posted a version of the cartoon in which a boot labeled with the Russian flag is kicking the grim reaper out of its doorway (shown below, left).ġ0 days later, the original cartoon was uploaded to 9GAG, receiving more than 120 points in six years. ![]() The post received more than 330 points (94% upvoted) and 30 comments in six years. However, the cartoon likely dates back earlier than this post.ĭays later, on August 21st, 2013, Redditor supersaiyanbr0ku posted the image in the /r/conspiracy subreddit. In this variation, the grim reaper is wearing a United States flag, while the doors are labeled "Iraq," "Libya," "Egypt" and "Syria," criticizing America's foreign policy and military engagements in other countries (shown below). The earliest known instance of these cartoons was posted by Taringa xelha999 on August 16th, 2013. ![]()
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