“Zovi’s First Comic Strip: Someone Unplugged the Big Apple – A Franco-Chinese Artist’s Account of the Pandemic On Foreign Soil”

For her very first comic strip, the Franco-Chinese author and illustrator Zovi evokes her prolonged stay in New York City in the midst of the pandemic, with the album Someone unplugged the Big Apple.

Born to a Chinese father and a French mother, Zovi was raised in France, but as of 2019, she has already been living in China for ten years. Joshua, her boyfriend with whom she has a long-distance relationship, is preparing to move with her to Shanghai in three months. To see how the cohabitation is going, she decides to take advantage of the Chinese New Year and spend her holidays at his home in the United States before taking the plunge. The young woman has packed her bags for a two-week stay, but just as she is in the air, she learns that Wuhan is sealed off, and that all of China has been quarantined. She arrived in New York at the same time as the Covid-19 virus was declared transmissible between humans. As a result, his stay is extended by several weeks. His return flight is canceled indefinitely, and his visa expires. She then finds herself in a confined city, living in fear of being expelled from the country but without any means of returning home.

Although few people have experienced confinement abroad, twelve thousand kilometers from their residence, we all have our own stories about the pandemic. However, through an intimate account relating the impact of this dark and strange period on her personal life, the author and illustrator Zovi also offers a look at Chinese culture, which remains relatively unknown to Westerners, and that is what that I found most interesting in Someone unplugged the Big Apple. She is surprised by a gathering of the Black Lives Matter movement in the streets of New York, for example, when she has not seen any demonstrations in the last ten years. She has to relearn distrust by wandering through certain disreputable neighborhoods, since with all the surveillance cameras, the streets of Shanghai are much safer. She also compares the “soft” confinement in the United States to that in force in China, where citizens found themselves outright imprisoned at home for months.

Someone unplugged the Big Apple is printed in black and white, and uses only variations of shades of red for its coloring, ranging from carmine and rosé to pearly pink and burgundy, which creates a unique visual style. With his naïve characters only having dots for eyes, Zovi’s clean drawings don’t have much depth, but his draughtsmanship is eminently likeable. His full-page illustrations are much more elaborate and beautiful, including a scooter ride through the streets of Shanghai, or a scene in a New York park filled with masked people under a shower of cherry blossoms. In addition, his graphic compositions are inventive. She puts the Mandarin dialogues on the side of her translated images, and during certain telephone conversations between China and the United States, she places the interlocutors each in their box, with the speech bubbles sticking out of the frame to connect the two characters.

At first glance, we could say to ourselves that we do not really want to dive back into the heart of this dark period marked by confinement, but beyond a simple story of a pandemic, Someone unplugged the Big Apple is a luminous comic book that talks about love, friendship, change of scenery, and the choices, professional and personal, that change a life forever.

Someone unplugged the Big Apple, by Zovi. Published by Mécanique Générale, 128 pages.

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