Not every comic recounts the super-heroic efforts of a Spiderman or a Wonder Woman. Some, instead, address serious public health concerns. A few even give an artist a chance to examine his past.
A case in point: "No Ordinary Flu," the hot-off-the-press comic that spells out the perils of pandemic flu, put out by a group of national health departments, including Seattle & King County Public Health. Focus groups led the local department to settle on graphic illustration as the medium best able to reach immigrant and refugee groups. In need of an artist, the department tapped local illustrator David Lasky. And the rest, as they say, was his own history.
"My great-grandmother was a victim of the 1918 pandemic," Lasky admits. When she died, one of her children, Lasky's grandmother, was placed in an orphanage, an event that affected his family for generations. In preparing to draw the comic, Lasky studied the pandemic that swept the globe 90 years ago and took 50 million lives worldwide.
"No Ordinary Flu" makes use, not of Lasky's own tale, but a fictional story. In the comic, a teenaged boy finds an old picture of an unknown relative. That's your great uncle, the boy's mother tells him, detailing how the family member died during the 1918 pandemic. As the comic cuts to the present, a TV newscaster informs viewers that today's health experts are concerned a new flu virus could lead to another outbreak. Depicting the virus as a highly magnified blue globe, riddled with spiky growths, the graphic images compare the past to the present, suggesting techniques to stop a new virus's potential spread. The comic, complete with easy-to-read text, comes in 12 languages.
When Lasky heard the comic would be translated, it occurred to him that his own great-grandmother had emigrated from Russia. She spoke Yiddish. When the pandemic struck, cultural and linguistic barriers hampered the dissemination of health information.
By illustrating the comic, Lasky says he imagined what it must have been like for his ancestors. In creating this new work, he gets to help people prepare before a potential pandemic strikes. And, he says, "I'm helping immigrants that [are like] my great-grandparents were."