Every family has its own traditions. From Sunday mornings at church to Sunday dinners with your grandparents, all that matters is the time spent together.
For many, covid brought about a disruption of that. Lives were in upheaval and oftentimes families had to face separations that caused a break in the normal family routines.
For one man, it meant he missed out on his favorite thing – reading the Sunday morning comics from the newspaper to his grandchildren. But with covid came logistical problems. Unable to be with his family on Sundays, one of his grandchildren suggested starting a YouTube channel. And from that simple idea “Grandpa Reads The Comics” was born.
“On Sunday for family dessert, I would take the Sunday comics and gather some of my grandchildren around, and start reading the comics to them. Then when the pandemic came we weren’t able to meet together as a family, Craig Hansen said.
(But) somebody said, ‘Obviously, you should start a YouTube channel and read the comics to your grandchildren,” he said.
And so he did. “Comics … they’re really the fabric of our lives,” Hansen said.
But his channel and his hopes at making the world a bit brighter, were not reaching as many people as he had hoped.
“I recorded about 400 episodes. Not very many people were watching. I was discouraged because I thought that there was more value than was being shown,” Hansen said.
But then a someone posted a video to Instagram. Cole Caetano, who as @karvetv, has more than 100,000 followers, had made his channel on the premise of finding videos on YouTube that had no views, but the potential to bring joy to others. Then he would promote that video on his page.
“What I do is I find struggling creators that don’t have anybody watching them and then I make a video showcasing their channel onto my channel. And then I use my audience and community to go help them out and lift them up,” Cole said.
“Right away, when I clicked onto Grandpa’s channel I just knew… I went through and I just saw such wholesome content, such as him dancing with his wife, playing with his dog,” he said. “And the main thing he did was, he would read the comics to his audience and then he would end the video with a positive message which was really cool.
Cole told his viewers that Hansen had more than 400 videos, with words of wisdom for his viewers. But the YouTube channel only had 222 subscribers. That all changed after Cole’s post.
Instantly viral, it received more than 581,000 likes, with 2,600 comments, majority of which said they had subscribed to Hansen’s channel.
And they did. Within two days, “Grandpa Reads The Comics” reached 180,000 subscribers.
Hansen said he was shocked. He had stopped posting in Sept. 2021. Suddenly, though, his final video (a reading of a “Dennis the Menace” comic) had received nearly 3,000 comments, praising Hansen and begging for him to start up the videos again.
So he did. He thanked his new subscribers, and said he would try to make a new video daily.
Hanson told viewers in a later video that “you’ve, like, breathed life into this old man.”
Giving hope to others was all he had ever wanted, he said.
“There’s never been a greater need for kindness, for love, for encouragement, for accepting people the way they are. And the fact that we are an army of goodness and that there are some things that we can do if we work together.”
