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The “Hero’s Welcome” editorial cartoon by Canadian artist Pia Guerra. (Courtesy Pia Guerra)

This single cartoon about school shootings is breaking peoples’ hearts

By Samantha Schmidt February 20 at 6:13 AM Email the author
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/20/this-single-cartoon-about-school-shootings-is-breaking-peoples-hearts/?utm_term=.ae23f956d524

As news of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., unfolded last week, Pia Guerra, a 46-year-old Vancouver-based artist, felt helpless. She couldn’t bring herself to go to sleep, so she began to draw.

At about 6 a.m., she came up with an idea. One of the first victims identified among the 17 people killed was Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach and security guard. Feis was shot after reportedly throwing himself in front of students during the rampage. Guerra was struck by the thought of this heroic man, the father of a young child, standing in front of bullets for students.

“It’s not often that an image pops in your brain and you feel a lump in your throat,” Guerra told The Washington Post.

“I need to get this down before time dilutes it,” she recalled thinking as she began to sketch the image in her head.

Around midday, Guerra posted her editorial cartoon on Twitter. She called it “Hero’s Welcome.”

The cartoon portrays a young, freckle-faced girl reaching out to hold Feis’s hand. “Come on Mister Feis!” the girl is depicted saying. “So many of us want to meet you!”

Behind the girl stands a massive crowd of young children and a few adults, looking to Feis with wide eyes. They look solemn and innocent. Two of the children are seen waving. The crowd, Guerra says, represents the scores of children and adults that have previously been killed in mass school shootings.

More than 200 people have been killed in mass school shootings in the United States since the mid-1960s, according to a Washington Post tally. After Wednesday’s Florida shooting, authorities say that Nikolas Cruz, 19, entered his former high school, fired his AR-15 assault-style rifle, killing 14 students and three school staffers. He has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

Most of the children and teachers visible in Guerra’s cartoon, including the girl reaching out to Feis, depicted victims killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which left 28 dead.

Guerra’s cartoon evoked striking responses across social media. By Tuesday morning, the image had been retweeted more than 18,290 times, and Guerra’s Twitter account had been overwhelmed with emotional messages.

“I saw this earlier, and I sat in front of my students and cried,” one teacher tweeted on Friday. “And then I showed it to them, and they cried, too. Very powerful. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“When I saw your drawing, I cried hysterically for a half-hour and I couldn’t stop,” another person posted on Twitter. Guerra even heard from a parent of a girl who died in the Sandy Hook shooting.

Guerra had offered the cartoon to the daily comics publication the Nib, for which she is a regular contributor. But the Nib ended up choosing a different cartoon of Guerra’s for publication, so she chose to simply share “Hero’s Welcome” on social media.

To many, Guerra said, the cartoon depicted the children and teachers welcoming Feis to heaven. Guerra knew before she posted the image that many may interpret it in a religious way, and “that’s fine,” she said. But that was not her intention.

Guerra describes herself as an atheist. After a tragedy, she said she grows tired of always hearing about angels and heaven and the idea that the dead all end up in a better place.

Pia Guerra (Courtesy Pia Guerra)
“Wherever all these wonderful people are, they’re not here,” she said. But the message, she said, “is beyond that.”

She wanted to show the immense, collective magnitude of the loss, a visual tally of just how many people have died in mass school shootings. She also wanted to evoke the nature of the youngest victims of these shootings — the wide-eyed, gentle essence of a child.

“This is who they are,” she said, her voice catching as she held back tears in a phone interview. “This is all that we lost.”

The simplicity of the cartoon, she said, means it may carry different meanings for different people. “When you leave something open enough to interpretation, more people can find something in it,” she said.

In addition to significant praise, Guerra’s cartoon also drew a wave of criticism for seemingly portraying only white children and adults, despite the fact that many people of color have died in these shootings.

“That was a direct result of rushing and not paying more attention to the make up of the crowd, and maybe making a point about how these things always seem to happen in white suburbia and totally mucking it up,” Guerra said. She lamented the lack of representation in the image.

“I’m taking the note and I promise to do better,” said Guerra, whose father is Chilean and mother is Finnish. She was born in New Jersey and moved to Canada when she was six years old.

Guerra co-created the science fiction comic book series “Y: The Last Man” alongside Brian K. Vaughan, which began publication in 2002. But since the election, her cartoons have focused predominately on President Trump. It’s her way of “venting,” she said. One of her most widely shared cartoons, from January of last year, depicted Trump as a child sitting on the lap of Stephen K. Bannon, then the White House Chief Strategist.

She is accustomed to provoking a range of reactions with her cartoons — usually anger, frustration or humor. But “Hero’s Welcome,” she said, was entirely different.

“It’s more emotional, it’s more personal … a gut reaction,” she said. “This is a whole other level.”

Guerra plans to continue to create images related to last week’s shooting.

“We should be engaged in this,” she said. “We should use our voices … whatever it is we have to amplify what’s important to us.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/20/this-single-cartoon-about-school-shootings-is-breaking-peoples-hearts/?utm_term=.ae23f956d524