What do you think?
Rate this book
Covid Chronicles
An illustrated feature chronicling ten personal accounts of life and death from the frontlines of COVID-19. These true stories from journalist Ethan Sacks (Old Man Hawkeye) are brought to vivid life by Dalibor Talajic (Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, Hotell). Originally distributed online by NBC News, these tales of hope amidst devastation are now available in print for the first time, fully colored, with behind-the scenes features. From a man stuck in Wuhan during the initial days of the outbreak to an ICU nurse in the thick of one of the busiest hospitals in the country to an Italian opera singer who goes viral while trying to bring hope to his devastated neighborhood, this series takes you where news cameras couldn’t go.
144 pages, Paperback
Published December 15, 2020
5 people are currently reading
74 people want to read
About the author
Ethan Sacks
236 books38 followersEthan Sacks is a writer and journalist from New York, who is currently writing the ongoing series Star Wars- Bounty Hunters for Marvel as well as other various Star Wars titles. He is also know for his Marvel works that take place in the iconic Old Man Logan wasteland, Old Man Hawkeye and Old Man Quill.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 17, 2020
COVID Chronicles collects the short comics Ethan Sacks and Dalibor Talajic produced for the NBC News website earlier this year, coloured for this print edition by Lee Loughridge. Everything here is nonfiction and covers stories from the multiple frontlines of the 2020 pandemic.
There’s the 23 year old nurse having to reuse PPE for days at a time because of supply shortages, and worrying she’ll inadvertently go home and infect her loved ones. There’s a middle-aged mother who gets COVID-19 and almost dies but her faith and her will to be there for her kids gets her through. There’s a story about life during lockdown at ground zero, Wuhan, told from the perspective of a Chinese university researcher working in London but returning to Wuhan to visit his parents - what was meant to be a 2 week holiday stretches to 4 months before he can return to his life in the UK.
This is an amazing book about amazing people doing amazing things going through a time none of us have experienced before (and hopefully never will again). “Enjoyable” doesn’t seem a fitting word to describe this, but COVID Chronicles is a compulsively readable book, despite the all-too-real horrors on every page.
The only reason I put the book down every few chapters was because the stories are too emotionally draining. We’ve just gone through all of that and to relive it again - the fear, the paranoia, the misinformation - is still harrowing. So I can totally see people who aren’t ready to go through the dark days of March/April (when most of the stories take place) again not rushing to pick this one up, particularly if you’ve lost someone to the coronavirus.
That said, though there are numerous moments of jarring sadness - a nurse holding up a phone to a dying patient so their family can say their final goodbye; a journalist about to interview the mother of a COVID victim and realising she hasn’t been told her son is dead yet - the stories highlight the good that people do under extraordinary pressure. The Toronto ER doctor, under strict instructions not to test anyone except essential workers, testing a non-essential worker so that he has the peace of mind that he can go home and not infect his children. A street medic in Tulsa, helping the injured during this past summer’s Black Lives Matter riots. An ER doctor treating immigrants in Matamoros, Mexico.
The stories show the best sides of humanity - our resilience, kindness, ingenuity, compassion - and these medical professionals certainly deserve to be celebrated for doing what they do, and then going back the next day to do it all again. Talajic’s expressive art lends the stories a vivid humanism and the many photo references he used, including pictures of the real people these stories are about, are included at the back of the book.
COVID Chronicles is a tough read, not because it’s badly written - it’s not - but because the heavy subject matter is still so raw for so many. And we’re still not out of it yet either. We’ve now got the vaccines, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there still feels like a long way to go before we’re out of it - and this winter promises to be a bitter one for too many, given the uptick of the second wave. These uplifting stories are a reminder though that there is hope happening every day somewhere, even amidst such overwhelming darkness, because there’s undoubtedly enough material from this year to fill thousands of books like this.
And COVID-19 will be gone one day but the memories and work of the medical professionals who saved so many during this time will live on, in part thanks to books like this that show us, amidst so much death, the life happening on the frontlines.
There’s the 23 year old nurse having to reuse PPE for days at a time because of supply shortages, and worrying she’ll inadvertently go home and infect her loved ones. There’s a middle-aged mother who gets COVID-19 and almost dies but her faith and her will to be there for her kids gets her through. There’s a story about life during lockdown at ground zero, Wuhan, told from the perspective of a Chinese university researcher working in London but returning to Wuhan to visit his parents - what was meant to be a 2 week holiday stretches to 4 months before he can return to his life in the UK.
This is an amazing book about amazing people doing amazing things going through a time none of us have experienced before (and hopefully never will again). “Enjoyable” doesn’t seem a fitting word to describe this, but COVID Chronicles is a compulsively readable book, despite the all-too-real horrors on every page.
The only reason I put the book down every few chapters was because the stories are too emotionally draining. We’ve just gone through all of that and to relive it again - the fear, the paranoia, the misinformation - is still harrowing. So I can totally see people who aren’t ready to go through the dark days of March/April (when most of the stories take place) again not rushing to pick this one up, particularly if you’ve lost someone to the coronavirus.
That said, though there are numerous moments of jarring sadness - a nurse holding up a phone to a dying patient so their family can say their final goodbye; a journalist about to interview the mother of a COVID victim and realising she hasn’t been told her son is dead yet - the stories highlight the good that people do under extraordinary pressure. The Toronto ER doctor, under strict instructions not to test anyone except essential workers, testing a non-essential worker so that he has the peace of mind that he can go home and not infect his children. A street medic in Tulsa, helping the injured during this past summer’s Black Lives Matter riots. An ER doctor treating immigrants in Matamoros, Mexico.
The stories show the best sides of humanity - our resilience, kindness, ingenuity, compassion - and these medical professionals certainly deserve to be celebrated for doing what they do, and then going back the next day to do it all again. Talajic’s expressive art lends the stories a vivid humanism and the many photo references he used, including pictures of the real people these stories are about, are included at the back of the book.
COVID Chronicles is a tough read, not because it’s badly written - it’s not - but because the heavy subject matter is still so raw for so many. And we’re still not out of it yet either. We’ve now got the vaccines, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there still feels like a long way to go before we’re out of it - and this winter promises to be a bitter one for too many, given the uptick of the second wave. These uplifting stories are a reminder though that there is hope happening every day somewhere, even amidst such overwhelming darkness, because there’s undoubtedly enough material from this year to fill thousands of books like this.
And COVID-19 will be gone one day but the memories and work of the medical professionals who saved so many during this time will live on, in part thanks to books like this that show us, amidst so much death, the life happening on the frontlines.
September 28, 2023
“True stories from the front lines of Covid-19” is the tagline for this somber but excellent collection of ten short stories about the current pandemic.
Published in December 2020 (before another graphic novel with the same name and more contributors in February 2021), these timely vignettes utilize the stories that NBC News used online that visualized life for front-line and essential workers early in the pandemic.
These personal accounts span the globe, giving us intimate looks at people affected by this terrible worldwide crisis. Oftentimes people become numb to mass suffering (which I first noticed during the 2004 tsunami) but connect with individual stories. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, explains: "When numbers simply can’t convey the costs, there’s an infuriating paradox at play. Slovic calls it psychic numbing. As the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy, our willingness to help, reliably decreases. This happens even when the number of victims increases from one to two." (Vox.com, September 5, 2017– written well before this pandemic)
The book begins with a foreword by actress and activist Alyssa Milano who warns that we will not “enjoy” these stories, instead, they are to be “experienced”. And that proved to be very true- they were difficult but necessary stories that showed humanity in the midst of sorrow. The following ten accounts were interviews that Ethan Sacks the comic book author, and former journalist for the New York Daily News, conducted with acquaintances and then branched out to other people willing to share their stories and photos for the artist Dalibor Talajić to refer to when creating his evocative illustrations.
The stories varied in locale (US, China, Mexico, Canada, Italy) with a mix of stories about medical staff, patients and researchers. There was an opera singer in Italy who went viral (check YouTube for a video on him), a man visiting family in Wuhan and having to stay for four months vs a few days, a street medic helping during BLM protests in Tulsa (I found the behind-the-scenes prep very inspiring), a journalist who finds out during the interview that the mother doesn’t know her adult son just died, doctors making tough calls and scientists tracking the early spread of the disease.
As the foreword warned, I did not enjoy this book, yet I am so glad I read it. It brought back memories of my anguish of having my mother hospitalized twice last summer (not with Covid) and not being able to visit her in the hospital. But it also reminded me of the kind healthcare workers who helped me speak to her daily with phone and video calls. There is a lot of kindness in the world, and this book shines a light on people who have stepped up to help during this terrible time.
This review can also be found on my blog: https://graphicnovelty2.com/2021/04/2...
Published in December 2020 (before another graphic novel with the same name and more contributors in February 2021), these timely vignettes utilize the stories that NBC News used online that visualized life for front-line and essential workers early in the pandemic.
These personal accounts span the globe, giving us intimate looks at people affected by this terrible worldwide crisis. Oftentimes people become numb to mass suffering (which I first noticed during the 2004 tsunami) but connect with individual stories. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, explains: "When numbers simply can’t convey the costs, there’s an infuriating paradox at play. Slovic calls it psychic numbing. As the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy, our willingness to help, reliably decreases. This happens even when the number of victims increases from one to two." (Vox.com, September 5, 2017– written well before this pandemic)
The book begins with a foreword by actress and activist Alyssa Milano who warns that we will not “enjoy” these stories, instead, they are to be “experienced”. And that proved to be very true- they were difficult but necessary stories that showed humanity in the midst of sorrow. The following ten accounts were interviews that Ethan Sacks the comic book author, and former journalist for the New York Daily News, conducted with acquaintances and then branched out to other people willing to share their stories and photos for the artist Dalibor Talajić to refer to when creating his evocative illustrations.
The stories varied in locale (US, China, Mexico, Canada, Italy) with a mix of stories about medical staff, patients and researchers. There was an opera singer in Italy who went viral (check YouTube for a video on him), a man visiting family in Wuhan and having to stay for four months vs a few days, a street medic helping during BLM protests in Tulsa (I found the behind-the-scenes prep very inspiring), a journalist who finds out during the interview that the mother doesn’t know her adult son just died, doctors making tough calls and scientists tracking the early spread of the disease.
As the foreword warned, I did not enjoy this book, yet I am so glad I read it. It brought back memories of my anguish of having my mother hospitalized twice last summer (not with Covid) and not being able to visit her in the hospital. But it also reminded me of the kind healthcare workers who helped me speak to her daily with phone and video calls. There is a lot of kindness in the world, and this book shines a light on people who have stepped up to help during this terrible time.
This review can also be found on my blog: https://graphicnovelty2.com/2021/04/2...
September 25, 2021
I found myself saying, "This is so crazy." This story is so crazy. I can't believe this really happened. I can't believe this really happened TO US.
Andrea reminded me this is still happening to us.
Andrea reminded me this is still happening to us.
August 24, 2021
Pulled from interviews with real people on the front lines of the pandemic (medical staff, patients, a reporter, civilians in highly-impacted areas), these poignant short stories show many of the real-life experiences of the pandemic and its impacts on people, including the anxieties, fears, frustrations, grief, and hope. A great short read that makes a very good time capsule of this period. Highly recommended.
July 15, 2021
These mini true stories are sometimes poignant, but ultimately don’t provide any new insight into the COVID-19 pandemic. If you followed the news during the pandemic, nothing here will be new or surprising. These are very simplistic, bare bones stories that have plenty of heart while lacking in depth.
April 19, 2021
Poignant and harrowing stories from (mostly) frontline workers in the battle against COVID-19. There's some striking artwork as well as a great behind the scenes section showing how the stories were gathered and became the finished product.
September 17, 2021
A very intense, realistic, and emotional reading. So many painful memories come back. Depicts the stories of victims, survivors and general population around the world, including stories from the real heroes of this pandemic, the health professionals, and all those who risk their lives to keep us safe from harm. Worth reading, with great illustrations.
February 4, 2022
Na prvu priče su mi djelovale kao jedno od onih izdanja koje služe unovčenju nečeg trrenutno aktualnog, ko strip adaptacije filma, ali do kraja postale su mi jako bliske, tip knjige koju bi hti imat na polici ko svjedočanstvo jednog doba kojeg sam proživio.
August 21, 2023
This is an incredibly moving collection of illustrated vignettes of front line workers during the first year of the pandemic. Reporters, healthcare workers, COVID survivors, and more have their stories told.
January 11, 2024
Self serving, braggadocious propaganda. “Foreword by Alyssa Milano” should have been the first indicator. I’ll keep this so I can show future generations and say “look at this, this is what the put out there into the world as common and happening everywhere. See how they lied”.
January 2, 2021
Astounding. It might be the fact that I’m waiting for covid test results that made this book seem more poignant but I’m sure it is an incredible piece of work nonetheless
May 13, 2021
Great intent/message but the storytelling itself was kinda flat/not the most interesting to read
June 17, 2021
I was underwhelmed by this book.
September 14, 2021
Good concept, poor execution
December 25, 2021
Extremely well done depictions of the diversity of early COVID pandemic experiences. Hard to believe this was published over a year ago and still seems so fresh and relevant.
February 19, 2022
This was heartbreaking.
March 29, 2022
Powerful
February 17, 2025
Oh my goodness. This book is so heavy and raw. It’s hard to look back on 5 years later.
January 25, 2022
Art feels disconnected from typography but stories are informative
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews