By Zack Quaintance — Throughout this ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, comics writer Dominic Archer has been collaborating with a series of artists on short comics aimed primarily at disseminating vital information. Some of these comics lean more informative, conveying vital information about the science of it all, while others are essentially visual representations of recent headlines.

Whatever the case, Archer and his many artistic collaborators have now made 31 short comics related to COVID-19, complete with credits, annotations, and a dedicated page on Tumblr. It’s a varied and fascinating project, to be sure, and I recently had a brief phone chat with Archer about it, which you can find below.

Enjoy!

Dominic Archer (COVID-19/COVID-20) Interview

ZACK QUAINTANCE: Let’s start with the basics. Tell me a little bit about this project and how it first came together…

DOMINIC ARCHER: We first started thinking about it at the end of January, begining of February. I used to live in China, my girlfriend is Chinese, and when all the coronavirus stuff started, it started in Wuhan. My best friend is from Wuhan. When I was looking at the BBC or different news sites, it was basically, “This thing in China is happening…isn’t it crazy?” Meanwhile, we were messaging with friends in China asking are you quarantining, is everyone okay, what’s going on?

In the U.K. and in the U.S. it just seemed really faraway. Then, there started to be this kind of growing racism toward Chinese people and Asian people in general, being connected with the coronavirus. We were talking about numbers: this many people are sick, this many people are dying, but we never heard the humanity coming out of it. Nobody was discussing how this was actually effecting the people involved. It was 15 million people quarantined in one day in China.

So, it kind of started as a way of showing what’s happening? How did this happen? How are the people effected by it being effected? It took us a couple of months to get the ball rolling, but it was a thing we really wanted to do.

QUAINTANCE: A big part of the goal here seems to be informational. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re hoping this project accomplishes?

ARCHER: To begin with the idea was there’s, frankly, an overwhelming amount of information about coronavirus people can’t digest. Once that all comes out, it then turns to, well what is it really? In the U.K., we had, well, is it 5G towers actually causing it? All this…shit. [laughs]

Then you have this polarization of the media, where some people are saying it’s very serious and some people are saying it’s not serious. What I wanted to do was get the most accurate information I could find and lay it out in a simple, easy digestible way. This is what it is, this is where it came from, and this is what happened next. It’s something people can read in one page. It takes a minute or 2 minutes, and people can feel like they understand it a little clearer now.

We decided to do 40 or 50 pages on it, and to put it in an anthology book to raise awareness and hopefully money to go to do some good afterwards.

QUAINTANCE: Are there any informational comics you’ve taken inspiration from?

ARCHER: There wasn’t a specific book that inspired me. Once we decided we wanted to do it, it was finding where we wanted to post it. Once I found Webtoons—it’s incredible there is a comic book industry outside of Webtoons. Some of the books have 21 million views, and it’s easy to read. It’s incredible well-designed. So, it was, okay this is a better medium for us to imagine putting it onto. All the pages are set to an 8-4 format, so if we do want to print it, it’s set to the page size already.

So, we decided to release it for free on the Internet, formatted in a way we can release it later on.

QUAINTANCE: As a writer can you talk about the process for this, specifically with an eye toward what type of research you’ve had to do to inform these artists?

ARCHER: In the early months, I was devouring everything to do with coronavirus. We were safely in Moscow, but it was affecting our friends and family in China, it was a case of what is going on and why does everyone here seem so blase about it? Think back to January or February — the first case was diagnosed I believe in the U.S. on the 27th of January, and the response was, “oh, well it’s fine.” I remember thinking, I don’t know if it is.

Those first few months we read every story that came up. The biggest thing was trying to keep up with it. One of the most difficult things the project has been trying to keep up with the onslaught of news and information that followed. It was easier when it was mostly in Wuhan. Then, when it spread it was big events on cruise ships. Every one on a cruise ship suddenly got it, and the whole world was watching this cruise ship. No one remembers now, but it was very easy to research just that and have a clear idea of the narrative.

As it went on, everything become more complicated. For South Korea, we had to do one page, because their response was well-documented and easy to understand, but for the U.S., we’ve had to do four pages, because it was such a rollercoaster of information. The government said it was fine, health experts said it was terrible, and then the economy crashes. We were initially going to do 40 pages and now it’s going to be at least 50. There are things we can’t ignore that we hadn’t planned for initially.

QUAINTANCE: The last thing I wanted to ask is about how this varies from working on fiction. You’re covering something, it’s almost journalistic, but in terms of crafting the script you send to an artist, how does the process change when it’s informative versus a fictional narrative?

ARCHER: The biggest problem is keeping my opinion in check, and as I’ve gone on, I think I’ve become a little bit worse at it. To begin with, I wanted to do it as if the BBC did comics, this is the kind of thing they would be trying to do, trying to be as impartial as possible, which is really difficult once I started writing about the U.S. and especially about the U.K. When it comes to the U.K., my blood is boiling, but I can’t write, “And then Boris Johnson is a #*$&-ing idiot.”

The idea is to get across information people can trust. The minute I start slamming into people, it loses that integrity. It’s also important that we present the facts in the way that holds decisions to account. If we’re saying, well actually we don’t have an opinion on this — that’s not the idea. If it’s a bad decision, it’s a bad decision. Doesn’t matter who it is who made it. That’s been the biggest difference from fiction, where I can just say how I feel about it.

Read other comics interviews!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.