Artist Statement
The idea behind this project was to create a comic to encapsulate my experience self-isolating in quarantine. Journal-style comics are a familiar task to me, but I have noticed that quarantine has brought about a level of repetition and stagnancy to my life, which has siphoned my motivation to continue my older journal-style comic works. I came up with a new format that would be more appropriate to my current situation, a comic that is randomly generated from a pool of panels, each pool representing a time window within the day. This is meant to portray the restrictiveness of quarantine. There are only so many options to choose from, and the majority of them take place in my room.
However, despite these restrictions, with 20 panels per pool, the possibilities that come with various combinations end up surpassing the amount of journal comics I have kept in my archives. Unless my math is wrong, there are a total of 160,000 combinations available from 4 pools of 20. It was pleasantly surprising to see that despite a lot of aspects of normal life being shut down, there was still a fair share of living that I was capable of doing all by myself. Truthfully, I may have been physically alone, but some of these panels have inclusions of online connections, incredibly valuable under the circumstances.
Overall I think this project has turned into a reflection of my own philosophy on life in quarantine: it is not always going to be good, but neither is it always going to be bad. If the quality of my day is based on a dice roll among other factors, then statistically I should have some good days mixed in with subpar ones. That should be enough to push forward.