As I read the paper this a.m., I was surprised to realize - for the first time in nearly a year - that none of the comics showed their characters wearing masks. And last week, my wife had commented that one of the shows we watch (The Rookie) similarly did not display any signs of the pandemic.
I was wondering what you thought about such portrayals.
I imagine the TV is done to allow subsequent reruns not looking dated to this particular period. But I wasn’t sure such concerns applied the same to newspaper comics. The one I noticed was Dustin, in which one character was in a Starbucks, with a line of customers behind him - not a mask in sight. Just really struck me as weird, in light of what you would encounter if you went to a Starbucks IRL. And Frazz, which features a grade school custodian.
Yeah, I’m overthinking my morning comics. Likely the coffee hasn’t clicked in yet. What really struck me was that I hadn’t perceived this as weird before. Maybe it reflects the recent increased emphasis on masks under Biden…
We don’t watch a lot of new stuff, but we do watch FBI and FBI Most Wanted. When they came back from covid hiatus, they were paying lip service to masking and social distancing. Sometimes they’d wear them and sometimes not.
Now after about three total episodes, they seemed to have given up completely.
It’s not just the characters, of course. The actors are also at risk. I don’t know what to make of it - “liberal Hollywood” acting like trump science deniers? The bottom line is more important than safety? I don’t know.
Superstore’s inconsistency is actually really consistent. They are probably the best show dealing with this. They always have everyone wearing masks while out on the floor and in public, but when they are in the break room (sitting distanced) or in private they will sometimes remove them to talk to each other and sometimes not, which seems pretty accurate to what I’ve seen people do IRL. Many times characters will have whole conversations while wearing masks.
Compare that to a show like Law & Order: SVU whose mask usage is terrible and makes no sense! They pay lip service to it, but they’ll sometimes have masks on while walking around but then remove them so they can speak close up to a suspect. Or they’ll have one jury member wearing a mask and the person sitting next to them is not. No one ever wears masks in the interrogation room. Background actors in the station are all masked but the leads always make a show of taking them off when they walk inside. They are the worst and it takes me out of the show every episode.
I don’t know anything about those specific shows, but I have a friend on the production staff of another show. They’ve spent months on planning, which delayed production for months. They pushed a fall 2020 season to a Christmas special to a mid-2021 season to give themselves more time to prepare. According to my friend, there were serious, high-level discussions about delaying to 2022 or scrapping the series altogether.
They’re currently in pre-production for the next season, and the crew are getting tested daily with next-day results*. Everyone is wearing masks, and those who can work remotely are doing so (he was working from home for weeks). When they begin filming, everyone not on camera will have to be masked and maintaining as much social distancing as possible.
I don’t know if it’s worth the risks involved, but they’re definitely not denialists.
*He seemed genuinely surprised when I and another friend in the lab field told him that his production team was getting special treatment. He initially had trouble believing everyone didn’t have unlimited on-demand access to quick tests with less than 24-hour turn-around times.
Dork Tower’s characters have been masked or isolated for months. Same for Least I Could Do, Zits (on occasion) and Baby Blues. Heck, LICD even had a Masked Bernie in the strip yesterday. Now that’s a short lead time!
Jef Mallet, of Frazz, has commented on this a couple of times in the strip. Basically, he acknowledges the pandemic, but wants to tell stories about normal school life, especially since there’s currently such a wide variety in how school works.
Other strips take place entirely, or nearly so, within the home, and often primarily from the point of view of children, so the pandemic would have very little visibility. And still others might not even be set in the present time (obvious for, say, Wizard of Id or BC, but less obvious for, say, Funky Winkerbean).
I googled for webcomics in 2020. I only went with webcomics that seemed be depicting life in our current world; no fantasy settings, no science fiction settings, ho historical setting, no anthropomorphic animals. I eliminated any that had stopped publishing new strips prior to 2020. I checked with the most recently published strips and looked for those which seemed to depict public gatherings.
That said, I am not familiar with most of these webcomics and I may have misunderstood the context of some of them.
But here’s what I found:
Webcomics that depict characters wearing masks:
Diesel Sweeties, Moon Over June, Something Positive
Webcomics that depict characters not wearing masks:
Check Please, Dumbing of Age, Ennui Go, Extra Fabulous Comics, Heartstopper, My Giant Nerd Boyfriend, Pixie Trix, PVP, Questionable Content, Rain, The Rock Cocks, Sarah’s Scribbles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Tripping Over You, and Unshelved.
I noticed that quite a bit is well. They usually have them on in the store and usually have them off/socially distanced in the warehouse or breakroom. I assume it’s a combination of a few things namely giving the actors a chance to act without half their face covered and, depending on how long ago it was filmed, they can really only work with the restrictions they know about at the time of filming (or possibly even writing).
The Conners have been pretty good about it. In that case, at least as far as the in-show world is concerned, it seems to have a lot to do with Jackie and Mark being a bit on the neurotic side.
The Pixie Trix characters generally wear clothing. Even in the current strips which feature a mostly nude character, the other characters are fully dressed.
Now the Rock Cocks, on the other hand, is a webcomic with a lot of nude characters.
I read a comment from a TV writer that they decided on no masks. The writers want their show to work as reruns, where they might not even be in order, and don’t want the “Hey, this must’ve been shot in late '20/early '21!” to pull viewers out of the fictional world of the show.
Though I don’t watch the show, based on what I’ve seen on ads for it, and what I now read on Wikipedia, the courtroom drama Bull has been incorporating COVID-19, and the need for mask wearing and social distancing, this season.
It’s a bit of an off-color / adult observation, but I remember porn conspicuously switching to condom use during the height of the AIDS epidemic… which was certainly the right thing to do. But they didn’t carry on that way forever, either.
Penny Arcade spent the first four or five months having the main characters communicating via phone or computer in various permutations because they were distancing until one day the creators were just “Ok, screw this” and went back to having them share a comic frame. That comic’s commentary plainly said that they were just done with trying to make comics around it.
Dork Tower has the core characters living in the same house but they wear masks when out and the comic has touched on other aspects of masking. They’re still doing so as of late.
Full Frontal Nerdity did a long arc over the summer with the characters playing their roleplaying game via computer due to Covid but are back in person at the table now.
And while they’re unmasked around the table (probably safe enough, given that each other are the only social contact any of them ever get), on the rare occasions any of them is out in public (like at the comics shop), they’re masked.
With the added wrinkle, of course, that one of the characters has been playing via webcam since his introduction over a decade ago, since he lives in Alaska. They had to lampshade why they weren’t showing his face clearly now that Zoom is commonplace.
What really struck me was that I hadn’t perceived this as weird before. Maybe it reflects the recent increased emphasis on masks under Biden…