I’m not sure what it is about a pandemic that makes people want to see comic strips on the walls of an art museum. Here in Chicago, there are currently five exhibitions covering this American mongrel art form, from its early days to the present. Among them is the Chicago Cultural Center’s “Chicago: Where the Comics Came to Life,” which I designed and curated, with the help of my friend, the historian Tim Samuelson, and others. In it, we tried to piece together the story of comics from about 1880 through the nineteen-sixties. (A sister exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s excellent “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now,” takes up where we leave off.)