Maureen Burdock with Joanna Regulska, “The Right to Breathe.”
Against a background of aquamarine, the striking full-page illustration that introduces Maureen Burdock’s comic “The Right to Breathe,” evokes a suffocating, submarine world of shadows. A hospitalized woman is attached to a ventilator. A man kneels on another man’s neck as he lies, lifeless, on the pavement. In the top right corner of the page, a woman raises her arms in front of a protesting crowd, her mask lowered and her brow furrowed in anger, as she opens her mouth to scream.
Burdock uses curved lines and cross-hatching to render these subjects in the round. Bloated and even a little water-logged, Burdock’s figurative artwork conveys a sense of entrapment and loss of control.