A few years ago, Tumblr user theveryworstthing made a trilogy of comics comparing the transition of the New Year to a mage and a monster going through a cycle of killing the old monster and witnessing the rebirth of the new monster. It’s a strange and beautiful and poignant piece about living with hope in the face of a new beginning, even when the ending was so full of tragedy and heartache. I’ve been thinking a lot about it this year, about how the year 2020 would look if the artist made another installment, about the upcoming year after the striking year this one was.

Even without intense global strife, a lethal pandemic, increasingly overwhelming weather patterns brought on by climate change, and national escalation of violence and conflict, 2020 has been a rat bastard of a year. A real humdinger of a year. A Lucy pulling the football back from Charlie Brown at the last minute kind of year. The kind of year that eHarmony rightly paired with Satan in the single most genius marketing campaign I have ever seen (search on YouTube, it’s a riot).

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