Art Imitates Life in New Covid-19 Storyline
As of today, there is a storyline in Ginger Meggs that involves Ginger with his family and mates dealing with the global situation we find ourselves in.
I took quite a bit of time before I decided whether to include the world-changing events of the Coronavirus Pandemic in the strip. My reason for doing so was twofold:
Ginger Meggs has previously had storylines about everything from World War 1, 2, The Depression, Elections, Expulsions, Births, Deaths, more Wars, Celebrity and Sporting events - and it has thusly captured the zeitgeist of each decade in Australia over the last 98 years.
If I continued to do little day-to-day jokes that didn’t even reference these events, (even in the graffiti) I feel like readers would feel it was a bit strange. I can accept the argument that the comics are sometimes considered escapism from the world’s drudgeries, but Ginger Meggs is a very special comic strip.
These are all considerations I’ve been mulling over for weeks, but I’m confident it will stand the test of time.
I think future generations of Meggsie readers will be interested to see how Ginge dealt with these massive world events when they read about them in their history books.
I’ve only done a couple of Sunday strips that relate to the current situation, but I think going forward I’ll let those become a bit more stand-alone, unlinked to the daily storylines. It will be a reprieve for those readers who don’t want to read the coronavirus story.