Armandinho and the year 2020

COVID-19 and other topics

Abstract

The character Armandinho, famous for problematizing and questioning the reality of the adult world through his strips published on his official Facebook page, continued to take a critical stand in the face of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective of this paper is to verify how Armandinho, a creation of the cartoonist Alexandre Beck, saw the events that took place in 2020, revealing his positions on different themes. The methodology was based on five phases: 1) compilation of strips of the character Armandinho published on his Facebook page; 2) identification of the themes dealt with in them (quantification); 3) socio-historical contextualization of the strips in relation to the time of production; 4) bibliographic survey for the construction of the theoretical framework for the analysis of the strips; 5) interpretive-based analysis of the strips. Based on the ideas of historians Harari (2020) and Schwarcz (2020), the absence of leaders in the fight against COVID-19 and the importance of this moment in the recent history of the country and the world was noticed in the analyzed strips. Armandinho is a social character who inserts himself in Brazilian society and takes part, through the strips, in current themes.