Hanging in Del Reid’s office is a cartoon from The Buffalo News. Around the outer edges of a rectangular space are swipes of paint in various thickness; curved and connected into an abstract thicket that entraps various colored dots and, on the very outer edges of the fray, a martian character of some kind who seems to be tumbling, end over end, through this continuous loop of chaos.
And then there is white space. Lots of white space. Clarity that brings the eye dead center, where we see the Bills’ logo in full color.
The cartoon, by Adam Zyglis, is called The Bright Spot (Year 2020). It doesn’t take an art major to posit that the martian, struggling to find its footing, is a resident of western New York. The brushstrokes and colored circles are the obstacles we faced, the feelings of confusion and helplessness. The Bills are the one thing that made sense in a pandemic world that we could no longer relate to, at a time of great sadness and anger and tumult. Reid, who coined the term #BillsMafia and is an unofficial spokesperson for the team’s beloved fan base, keeps it there to remind him of a place the team has occupied in his life. All he knows, for the better part of five decades, is that this community has gravitated toward a group of people that seems to love them back—that, for a few hours every Sunday, take on this form of superhumanity and deliver them from all the world’s problems.
