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| March 2020 |
 Title text: "I've traveled here from the year 2020 to bring you this vaccine!" |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a TIME TRAVELING VACCINE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
This comic is another in a series of comics related to the 2020 pandemic of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, specifically regarding the Covid-19 vaccine. This comic shows 15 calendars and Cueball next to them. The first three months on the calendar are January, February and March 2020. It would be expected that the months would increase in order, but the calendar month stays at March 2020 until the final panel of the comic, where it switches to May 2021, the month this comic was released, indicating that Cueball is "stuck" in March 2020 for more than a year. The COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in March 2020 and Cueball (probably representing Randall) may feel that he has been unable to move on with life, or that time was at a standstill until he was fully vaccinated. It is plausible that Randall was past the two weeks after his final vaccination when this comic came out. He has made several comics centered around that of being fully vaccinated in the weeks up to this comic. Specifically 2450: Post Vaccine Social Scheduling and 2454: Fully Vaccinated in April.
In the penultimate 2 panels, Cueball is shown getting his two doses of the vaccine, with Ponytail and Hairy administering the vaccine. Also these two panels are in March 2020, but in reality they are most likely in March 2021 and April 2021, as there are typically 3-6 weeks between first and second dose depending on the type of vaccine. In the final panel, the calendar has switched to the current month, May 2021, showing that Cueball can now resume life after getting vaccinated, and most likely having passed the two weeks after final shot mark.
The title text refers to films, in which someone travels through time with a MacGuffin. It could be based on initial production of COVID vaccine in late 2020, or a reference to films in which an earlier "original" version of a virus is necessary to produce a viable vaccine. Mass rollouts of COVID vaccine ramped up significantly starting early in 2021, but vaccines were still scarce, and unavailable to most of the world.
The title text also appears to reference 630: Time Travel, further highlighting how the COVID-19 pandemic has skewed the perceived flow of time. While it’s technically true that the vaccines were brought from the year 2020, it was through the more ordinary “one day per day” form of time travel illustrated in this earlier comic.
Interestingly, there are only 15 panels, so if the 'normal' months increased in sync, it would "only" be March 2021, not May 2021. This may refer to the strange distortion of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clearly 17 panels would have made more sense when counting months, but the point here is that time has been at a standstill the last 14 months from March 2020 to April 2021; how many panels represents those 14 month (14, 12 or 10) is not important. Using 15 panels, makes the first 3 and the last 3 stand out from the 9 in the middle, which makes sense from the flow of the comic.
Transcript
- [In a 3 column by 5 row grid of panels, 15 monthly wall calendars are shown. All calendars have a large header with month and year given on two lines. Below this is a black border with 7 white lines, for each day of the week, and below that 5 rows with 7 columns, making all calendars the same, with 35 spaces. Nothing is shown in these grids. Next to each of these calendars Cueball is shown. In the first 12 panels, Cueball is standing next to the calendar, in only slightly different poses. The text on the calendars only change in the top row, then it stays the same for the next nine panels:]
- Calendar: January 2020
- Calendar: February 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- Calendar: March 2020
- [In the bottom row's first panel the calendar is, as always, to the left, but now Cueball is wearing a mask and sitting on a chair leaning a bit to the left while he is being vaccinated by a masked Ponytail to his right. She is inserting the needle into his left arm. To the right is a tall but small table with the vial from which she has drawn the vaccine standing next to the lid of the vial.]
- Calendar: March 2020
- [The bottom row's second panel is similar to the previous with Cueball wearing a mask and sitting on a chair leaning a bit to the left while he is being vaccinated - although this time by a masked Hairy, standing to his right. Hairy is also inserting the needle into his left arm. To the right is a different small table, with only one leg. On it is a vial from which Hairy has drawn the vaccine. Also some other black things are lying on the table, maybe other syringes for administrating the vaccine.]
- Calendar: March 2020
- [In the final panel Cueball again stands next to the calendar, but finally the text has changed.]
- Calendar: May 2021
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