Days of Their Lives: Steve Brodner’s “Living & Dying in America”

Days of Their Lives: Steve Brodner’s “Living & Dying in America”

Days of Their Lives: Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America

A personal memorial by the renowned cartoonist.

Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky
Pocket
Email

Introduction

Back in 1960, A.J. Liebling reminded his fellow citizens that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” As Steve Brodner knows only too well: Although he is considered by many (including me) to be the most brilliant caricaturist working today, the decline of print and the rise of editorial caution have meant fewer outlets for Brodner’s no-holds-barred graphic commentary. When, in the spring of 2020, Brodner felt compelled to chronicle the pandemic that was ravaging New York City and the world, he started publishing an illustrated newsletter, The Greater Quiet. He wasn’t the first to document the devastation brought on by a plague. In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys recorded the effects that the bubonic plague was having on London. In Pepys’s diary we learn that one of the ways Londoners protected themselves was by drinking cognac with cow urine. (Trump’s miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, was still centuries in the future.)

One difference between Pepys and Brodner is that the Brit was secretary to the Admiralty and never criticized another government official, no matter how corrupt or incompetent. Brodner, on the other hand, delights in mingling his sympathetic sketches of heroic hospital workers with vicious portraits of Trump’s hoodlums in high places.

Ed Sorel

A Personal Memorial

Like many people, I felt overwhelmed by the widening Covid-19 crisis. I have always dealt with my down periods by making pictures and writing things down. Journaling helps me look at my feelings as they occur, in real time.

I began with a simple portrait of a young New York male nurse. Soon I was drawing every day: finding people who were suffering in this terrible mass death, whose faces and names our consciousness might retain for an extra moment, making more vivid the lives that had been cut tragically short. This became a personal memorial for me, like lighting candles around a photo on a street corner. As the consequences of the pandemic became exacerbated by Trump administration malfeasance and mendacity, calling those political actors out became a clear part of the story as well.

Steve Brodner

Living and Dying in AmericaLiving & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020-2022 is published by Fantagraphics Books. This series continues weekly at theNation.com and daily at stevebrodner.substack.com.

Be part of 160 years of confronting power 


Every day,
The Nation exposes the administration’s unchecked and reckless abuses of power through clear-eyed, uncompromising independent journalism—the kind of journalism that holds the powerful to account and helps build alternatives to the world we live in now. 

We have just the right people to confront this moment. Speaking on Democracy Now!, Nation DC Bureau chief Chris Lehmann translated the complex terms of the budget bill into the plain truth, describing it as “the single largest upward redistribution of wealth effectuated by any piece of legislation in our history.” In the pages of the June print issue and on The Nation Podcast, Jacob Silverman dove deep into how crypto has captured American campaign finance, revealing that it was the top donor in the 2024 elections as an industry and won nearly every race it supported.

This is all in addition to The Nation’s exceptional coverage of matters of war and peace, the courts, reproductive justice, climate, immigration, healthcare, and much more.

Our 160-year history of sounding the alarm on presidential overreach and the persecution of dissent has prepared us for this moment. 2025 marks a new chapter in this history, and we need you to be part of it.

We’re aiming to raise $20,000 during our June Fundraising Campaign to fund our change-making reporting and analysis. Stand for bold, independent journalism and donate to support The Nation today.

Onward, 

Katrina vanden Heuvel 
Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x