March 13, 2020
Five years of germs, hygiene, anxiety, and paranoia
THIS WEEK:
Buddy and Romeo quarantine BEHIND THE PAY WALL
“Where Are They Now?” Single panel cartoons from and about the quarantine
DiPerri here. Before we start, on a serious note, I’d be remiss to not acknowledge the seriousness of the anniversary we’re marking this week. Going into quarantine and enduring the pandemic was one of the most consequential global events of our lifetime and the long and short term tolls it has taken on our personal lives, culture, and society continue to evolve. We hope today’s post finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy.
Months before the pandemic officially began, in November 2019, I happened to have counted how many times I washed my hands in a day. It was the first time I’d done so since 2004 so I was a little overdue. In November 2019, I think it was about 67 or 73. Or was it 43? I forget. I feel like there was a 3 in there. In 2004, I’m pretty sure it was over 140. Not sure if 2019 is an improvement or not… I probably should have counted in 2021. Maybe I don’t remember these numbers. Something like that. My hands have never been as dry and cracked and swollen as they were from 2020-2022.
While I’m thinking of it, let’s see where I’m at now. I’m going to count how many times I wash my hands on Thursday, March 13, 2025. These will be authentic hand washings. No record or number chasing. I expect Thursday to be an average day at work and at home. So we’ll find out next week.
I polled people back in 2004 on AOL Instant Messager ahead of this experiment both in my away message and through direct messaging. Here’s how the messages with a coworker from the grocery store went:
:: start of conversation ::
Me: Hey. How many times do you think I’ll wash my hands tomorrow?
Him: DiPerri, what the hell kind of question is that?
:: end of conversation ::
Now back to whatever I was thinking about before…
I thought the pandemic would usher in a new hygiene revolution. That the hand washing, single wear laundering and bathing multiple times a day would continue on forever.
We love food and new groceries. We did not love sanitizing EVERY. SINGLE. grocery item that we bought for the first few months of the quarantine. We also get a water delivery every couple weeks of five gallon jugs. I really hated hosing those off and scrubbing them in the driveway.
I felt pretty hopeless in late 2021/early 2022 and I didn’t think we’d ever resume the lives we knew before the quarantine. I really thought everything was behind us. I’m grateful to see that we came out on the other side. Five years later, we can still go outside for a walk, have a friendly conversation with our neighbors, work in the garden, and tend to that sourdough starter. But we can also go to the movies, go to our jobs, celebrate birthdays, and drive across statelines without thinking twice about it. Five years later, the sun still shines and spring is upon us. In darkness, there is hope.
Buddy and Romeo are heading into quarantine behind the paywall for the rest of this week’s post. Join us back there if you’d like.
Hold up. You know what would be fun? What if we ALL count how many times we wash our hands this Thursday?! Let’s start that hygiene revolution! Are you in??
We joined Instagram in 2017 (Late!! I, DiPerri, wanted no part of Facebook or its subsidiaries. Still don’t, but we’re there because we have to be). The account exclusively Buddy and Romeo. Our names weren’t on it and we had hardly any followers. I didn’t want any. If anyone was going to follow us, I wanted it to be because they liked Buddy and Romeo, not because we’d met years ago. Our posts would get single digit likes (some current posts still do) but we couldn’t care less. We had about 70-some-odd followers after a year and then we doubled that after the Buddy and Romeo short was a finalist in the GoComics animation contest.
After the strip ended in 2018, we didn’t post much and the account started shifting focus from one non-Buddy and Romeo project and back again. When the quarantine began, I was posting work from my old newspaper comic strip/book series My Guardian Grandpa. Frega and I had done a few single panel cartoons before the quarantine (50 to be exact, which is hardly anything. 10 in 2017; 10 in 2018, 30 in 2019). We hit the accelerator in early 2020 when our application to join CartoonStock was accepted. We needed at least 100 to start. Reformatting Buddy and Romeo comics as single panels allowed us to fulfill that initial requirement.
This is one of the first cartoons we came up with during the quarantine. It sold to Caribbean Compass in November 2020 but wasn’t published until three years later in April 2023. That happens sometimes.
We always liked the next one but it never sold. That happens sometimes too. A lot, actually. Most of our favorite cartoons don’t sell. Most of our cartoons don’t sell. It’s the nature of that industry. At least 90% rejection. One of the hard things about the pandemic cartoons is that even when we were still in it, the situation was so volatile, that some editors turned them down because they assumed the cartoon would be obsolete by the next issue. I’m not trying to make excuses for why we got rejected, in one case, that was confirmed to have happened. The editor said they liked a cartoon that featured a teacher wearing a mask and face shield in class but declined it because it would no longer be relevant. That was in the fall of 2020. We’re both teachers and as we unfortunately had to find out, it was all too relevant through the 2021-2022 school year. Horrible years.
Buddy loved the quarantine. This cartoon parodies an Ovaltine ad from the early 1900s.
This is our only sale so far to The Spectator. That was a big deal.
Speaking of big deals, this next cartoon prompted an overhaul and rebranding of sorts for our social media and single-panel cartoons. We used sign Buddy and Romeo cartoons and our first single panels as “DiPerri + Frega.” From 2016-2018, we signed the Buddy and Romeo comics “by Some Miracle.” Beginning in February 2021, we changed everything to “Frega DiPerri.”
When Bob Mankoff (Airmail cartoon editor and CartoonStock president…also former cartoon editor at The New Yorker and Esquire) selected our cartoon for his vaccine newsletter, we felt like we’d won the lottery and might finally be on the cartoon industry map.
Yeah, we’ve had a few of those false alarms. We’re nowhere near the map. The map is in a store window and we’re outside looking at it, trying to figure out if we may ever go anywhere. It’s a good looking map. This was the moment (February 2021), the Buddy and Romeo Instagram handle changed to @FregaDiPerri. We put an actual profile photo up and shifted our focus to posting single panel cartoons and our greeting card line, Coffee Lovers’ Christmas, so that Facebook can scrape it all for A.I. Cool.
We did two sequel cartoons during the pandemic. Here’s one that never sold.
This one sold to Please See Me!
Its sequel cartoon — did not!
See the difference? The cartoons promoting vaccination went somewhere. The ones that were less enthusiastic about it didn’t. I drew the cartoon above while we recovered from Covid. It was a bleak time.
Well, this wasn’t so fun! Sorry.
Join us behind the paywall for Buddy and Romeo in quarantine. Germaphobia, solitary confinement, and walking around in circles.
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