MISSION VIEJO, Calif. – Working from home is the new normal during the age of COVID-19, but it’s something cartoonist Kevin Fagan has done for decades.
“I began to realize that what I’m doing isn’t just a goofy thing for a living, which is what I always kind of thought. There is some importance to it,” says Kevin Fagan, a longtime Mission Viejo resident and cartoonist.
Fagan is the creator of the 41-year-old syndicated comic strip called Drabble, which centers around a family living in the greater Los Angeles area. The family experiences real life situations, including life during this pandemic. Each strip is submitted six weeks before it gets printed.
“For the whole month of May, you’re going to be seeing a whole lot of quarantine-related strips because I thought even if it’s all over with and life gets back to normal during that time, we all went through it and we’ll all relate,” says Fagan.
The famed cartoonist takes his job very seriously. He doesn’t create anything political. He wants to provide humor relief, but does not intend to make light of the seriousness of the virus.
Some of his strips this month include over-ordering mobile food deliveries, binge-watching TV, wishing ATM machines would dispense toilet paper, and even social distancing.
“You see the whole family sit together in the first box. As you look at the second box, you see the three older characters all sitting on the couch with the feet on the table and the two younger characters sit either side of them. So they say no we’re good, we’re six feet apart and they count all of the feet on the table,” says Fagan.
He has gained close to 2,000 new followers on social media since the quarantine. Fagan says he didn’t realize it until he got older, but it’s times like this that makes him realize that Drabble is more than a cartoon printed on newspapers, readers are attached to his characters because they help them find the silver lining even in uncertain times.