I DO NOT remember witnessing the Challenger explode in 1986. I was ten years old when it happened and in the days leading up to the launch I remember feeling excited that a school teacher got to go to space and that she would be teaching about space from the spaceship. It made interstellar travel seem attainable to ordinary people. I remember the appalling, tasteless jokes in the weeks following the explosion (What color were Christa McAuliffe's eyes? Blue. One blew that way, and the other blew this way.) which now strike me as a desperate coping mechanism. But I have no memory of the explosion, though I must have seen it because I remember the custodian wheeling in the television cart for us to watch the liftoff.

Maybe the gap in my memory is a kind of trauma response. Maybe the grief and disappointment were never really addressed so I just buried the event deep in my unconscious. I was a little nervous that the Artemis II mission would meet a similar fate, and am grateful that it has been a phenomenal success. What a relief to be able to joke about Orion's malfunctioning toilet, versus the entire freaking craft exploding into bits. And to hear Michaela tell us about the lunar crater now named for one of the astronaut's wives who died a few years ago. I've enjoyed the stories about the crew's "wake up" songs and hearing their awed descriptions of Earth as an oasis surrounded by icy darkness. From their vantage point, it's clear that we should all stop fighting one another and usurping the fragile resources that make it possible to live here. (Ignoring, for the present, the possibility that the entire purpose of the mission is to find new places with fragile resources to exploit.) Over and over again the astronauts try telling us that no matter how bad things seem on Earth, we are the luckiest motherfuckers in the universe. 

I am far from the first to make this observation, but the reminder of the cosmic coincidence that resulted in our pale blue dot is why this mission has been such a balm—its goal may be pure research, but its underlying theme is empathy and unity. No wonder our Dear Leader is disinterested. The Artemis II astronauts are delivering a message antithetical to everything he stands for. In the grand scheme, he is less than nothing. Not even a blip. From outer space, we all look puny. Which we are. But also we are here. Here. It's implausible. How did it happen? I know the Big Bang theory. Still, our existence is a bloody miracle. There's just no other way to look at it.

Dedicated Mushroom Head readers may have noticed that there was no Mushroom Head last week. Hours before Artemis II took off for the dark side of the moon, we landed in sunny Florida to spend part of Michaela's spring break staying with Uncle Mark and Aunt Martha and visiting our cousin Rebecca, her husband Matt, and their son Turner. The last time we saw them all was pre-Covid, so we were long overdue for a visit. We laughed a lot, played in the ocean, saw some wild dolphins, and otherwise enjoyed ourselves greatly. It felt good to break the post-pandemic "spell," so to speak. I made some diary comics, but am not entirely happy with the way they came out, so here are some Florida-inspired color studies instead.

Three Things Keeping Me Going This Week

1. I watched The Alabama Solution on the flight home from Florida. The movie is composed largely of footage shot from contraband iPhones in a maximum security prison in Alabama. The filmmakers focus on three incarcerated men who are striving to make the best of a reprehensible situation. Early in the film another inmate dies under suspicious circumstances, and the filmmakers record the fallout from his death as well as a massive statewide strike that the prisoners undertake to try to improve their unspeakably abysmal living conditions. I know this all sounds incredibly dark, and it is, but information is power and the very existence of the documentary is cause for hope.
2. Before Florida we took a day trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum to see the Gertrude Abercrombie show. I reviewed the show for Apollo when it was at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and was glad to have a chance to see it again. It looks fantastic in Milwaukee and also includes a small, fascinating companion show of Wisconsin artists who were friends with Abercrombie.
3. Your Astronauts, an eight-minute-long film by Tom Palazzolo of a 1969 ticker-tape parade in downtown Chicago celebrating the moon landing—colorful, joyous, and occasionally goofy. When the astronauts glide down Michigan Avenue in a big black convertible you can see the crowd going nuts. Tom seems to enjoy zooming in on attractive women in a way that would probably not fly today, but it seems wholesome rather than icky (or so I am telling myself). Using Ride of the Valkyries as a soundtrack was an inspired choice: it makes the whole thing cohere. Hat tip to New City's newsletter for the link.

That's all for this week, my dear Mushroom Heads! Hope to be back with some cartoons for you next week.

Til then, all my love,

Claire