‘My Running is Drawing’: A Peter Kuper Interview

Kuper in his New York Studio. Photo by José Alaniz. 

‘My Running is Drawing’: A Peter Kuper Interview

José Alaniz

 

Peter Kuper is the award-winning author of several books, including the environmentalist-themed graphic novel Ruins (2015) and the graphic non-fiction Insectopolis: A Natural History (2025), art from which is on exhibit at New York’s Society of Illustrators (see review). 

This interview took place at Kuper’s studio in New York City on June 12, 2025. Remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.

JA: I wanted to start by talking about Ruins (2015), particularly the sequence in the monarch butterfly preserve in which you switch to a gatefold, as a way (one could argue) to get at the emotional impact of environmental precarity. Artists often go with big images for that. Yours is a great example, because you actually expand the established parameters of the work itself. Can you tell me a little bit about what went into that decision?

PK: I was trying to capture something as grand as the monarch habitat. I thought, “I won’t capture it anyway, because nothing can.” Not even a photo will do the job, or film. Being in that environment, which happily I was, it’s a 360-degree experience. Wherever you’re looking, there they are. And it’s a tactile experience; the butterflies brush by your face. And you look down at the ground, and you see a river of shadows from them passing over and just all of the different aspects of that, which is just mind-blowing. So I was trying to figure out a way to approximate it, and a gatefold seemed like a way to do it. And the publisher was open to all the different things that I wanted to do.

Fig. 1 — The gatefold (detail) from Ruins (2015). 

JA: That moment when you come upon the gatefold, it’s almost like a pop-up book.

PK: I’m sure the publisher was like, oh, well, who knows if we’re going to make any profit on this book. But they were very good about it. And I suppose it’s like, IMAX or techniques you see in other media. Like in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), he has that character speak IN UPPERCASE. And so it’s that idea of playing with form, seeing what you can do with it. Somebody like [book designer] Chip Kidd is so good at looking at a project and thinking, “What can I do to make this a different kind of book?” I’m very interested in those possibilities as well.

Fig. 2 — Cover of Insectopolis: A Natural History (2025)

JA: I’d love to talk more about that in terms of the ancillary products you’re releasing with your new book Insectopolis (2025). You also have coloring books, plus the exhibit at the New York Public Library, the new exhibit at the Society of Illustrators [in New York], and the use of QR codes in both the exhibits and in the book. In short, you’re one of those artists who’s so versatile. I’ve taught Ruins and The System (1997), which uses stencil art. You really go beyond just pen and ink. (Not that there’s anything wrong with pen and ink!)

PK: Well, some of it has to do with me getting bored, actually. If I’m doing something that takes too long, it becomes tiresome. But another factor is trying to be responsive to the text and what feels best for the story. So with the Kafka adaptations [e.g., The Metamorphosis (2004)], some of those I did on scratch board, which sort of approximated woodcut. That felt like Kafka to me. I don’t even think or worry about my style. What is my style? As an illustrator, which I was for many years, it was difficult, because if you get hired for a job, they’re looking for a style, they’ve hired you for that style, and you do not change mid-job. Whereas with a graphic novel I can shift around. In the case of both Ruins and Insectopolis, I can stylistically move around throughout the book. A chapter or a section can be done in one style, then we can have, say, a dream sequence. So I can switch to watercolor here, or just for the background. Change it up. For my adaptation of Heart of Darkness (2019), I did the present-day conversation on the boat in pen and ink and digitally added halftone gray, but the story being told by Marlowe was done in a sketchbook style. So I had that back and forth, like in Ruins’ monarch section, which is pen and ink and digital and a lot of the other section is done with colored pencils, some pen and ink, watercolor. We start out in New York with pen and ink and digital, and then when they get to Mexico, we make a transition. I wanted it to feel the way my sketchbook felt, that stylistic shift, which makes you feel a change in the environment; “Oh, it’s warmer here.” One thing I didn’t consciously do in Ruins that I realized later comes from a book that was very important to me: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I realized that in his storytelling, he describes the main action in some chapters, and every other chapter is more poetic, descriptive. And I realized that that was the same metronomic beat that I was using in Ruins by occasionally going into the butterfly’s world: more lyrical, wordless and all that. But I didn’t do it consciously. It was only later that I saw I had structured it like The Grapes of Wrath.

JA: What’s fascinating to me is just how well it all works. Because you would think some of these things might not hang together. Also, thematically, this variety of styles and subtle differences play into the notion of an ecosystem. Form mirroring content!

Fig. 3 — QR code used in Insectopolis. 

PK: With Insectopolis, there is some challenging storytelling. I go into manga style and a lot of other stylistic shifts. My hope, I guess, is that someone will read it through once, read all the word balloons and see all the action and have a very nice experience, but then go back say, “Oh, wait, there’s QR codes in here. What else did I miss?” I mean, I cannot tell you the number of people that had not noticed that there are QR codes. Including the copy editor, who asked me at the very end of the process, where are the QR codes? And then I was like, really? I mean, you’ve been looking at the book all this time. But there’s this QR blindness. I had the exhibition at the New York Public Library [“INterSECTS,” 2022], where those QR codes were developed. They link to interviews with entomologists, some of the top people in their fields. It was a fantastic experience talking to them. But when the show was going on I thought that maybe not that many people are looking at the QR codes, because it’s sort of a young person’s thing. And also, we’re just hit with QR codes all the time. So, yeah, you get blind to them. But then I had an “aha” moment and thought, “I can put those in the book, they’ll still work.” So, yeah, you could call QR codes another “stylistic shift!”

Fig. 4 — A “post-apocalyptic” page from Insectopolis.

As for the content of Insectopolis, that was another “aha” moment in the library. Because we had COVID going on and all that, it led to the idea of making it a post-apocalyptic narrative, where all the people are killed and hordes of insects invade the library. That suggested the framing sequence that opens the book. I had gotten this fellowship [the 2020-2021 Jean Strouse Fellowship at the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers] based on the idea that I was going to do a history of insects and the people who study them. But the circumstances, what was going on around me, pretty much handed me this framing device.

JA: And I guess with a non-fiction work, unlike Ruins, you can have even more of that free-flow in terms of styles and content. You have different parts of the book and exhibit dealing with  various entomologist or figures related to different insects. You can mix those around at will, I suppose.

PK: And I did. I knew what the front end and the back end were going to be, but everything in-between was pretty wide open. And then, you start working on it, and realize you need a transitional panel here so that it leads into the next chapter. Or I’m just going to add a flying cicada, and now it’s flown on to the next page, which begins another chapter, and so on. Yeah, it was real free-form — or, you know, more like jumping without a parachute! But it was the subject matter being so engaging that made that happen. And I completely stumbled on Tezuka meeting Nabokov. I was just thinking, “I want to do Nabokov, but how?” I didn’t want to draw a full figure. I didn’t have enough reference for that, and I didn’t think a full figure would work. Then I was looking at one of my photos of a room in the library, and there were these busts there. And I thought, “He’ll be a bust!” So then it would have his name on it all the time. Also, I kept finding ways to use everything that I had, even my mistakes. There was a hilarious moment when I was doing the portion on the lac bug. I found a reference photo for a lac bug on Google, and I used it. Then I showed it to an entomologist, and they said, “That’s not a lac bug.” So in the book I just have the insect itself say, “Yeah, I’m constantly mistaken for the lac bug.” Stuff like that also helped move the story along. Because I had drawn it up and I didn’t want to have to change it, right?

Fig. 5 — Cover of Wish We Weren’t Here: 

Postcards From the Apocalypse (forthcoming 2025). 

My next book, Wish We Weren’t Here: Postcards From the Apocalypse (forthcoming 2025) is on a similar theme. It collects my weekly environmental comics that appeared in Charlie Hebdo, that I’ve been doing for five years now.

JA: It’s really key to your productivity that you seem to have endless stores of energy, that you can just crank this stuff out so fast. Is this theme of the environmental crisis somehow related to a sense of urgency for you?

PK: A lot of it is you just do what you know. Depression can make some people be frozen in place. My way of fighting depression is to keep myself busy. I’ve been dealing with the environmentalist theme for a long time, like in It’s Only a Matter of Life and Death (1988). But way before that, when I was a kid, we had science fiction that was always touching on that topic, with pollution and the bomb and all that. It was a big piece of my education. When I got older, I read underground comics, like Slow Death (1970), that dealt with it head-on. I read those as early as I possibly could, and they had a big effect on my consciousness about the environment. And you know, there was the first Earth Day too [in 1970]. And I grew up in Cleveland. We had the Cuyahoga River that caught fire. So there was a lot. And being interested in insects from a young age, it all got me thinking about nature, just generally. At a certain point I just thought everything is connected to the environment. You can talk about politicians and all the minutia and wars and all that. But breathable air and potable water trumps everything. So, yeah, it’s not a recent theme for me at all. It’s just gotten even more pronounced with time.

JA: I was just reading a Guardian piece[i] in which they interviewed several entomologists working in Central America. Some of these people had been there for 50 years, so they’ve seen a lot of changes. And they’re basically all depressed. They were talking about how 50 years ago they would put out these light boxes to capture insects at night and count them. But today they almost don’t want to put them out anymore, because it just makes them feel terrible about how few moths and other insects are left. They see their task as scientists now is less in researching the lives of these animals and more in cataloguing their extinction. I’ve talked to other artists who tell me they feel that the collapse of the environment is too big of a topic for them. Too overwhelming. Sure, they can do comics about defending abortion rights, fighting Trump or something like that. But biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, when they confront things like that some part of them seems to click off; they feel their art can’t really address that meaningfully. Clearly that’s not a problem for you!

PK: I know it’s insufficient, but every time I do a cartoon, there’s a period of joy. I think, “I’ve got this idea, I’m saying something that people are going to see, it’ll alert somebody.” But it’s also just the joy of drawing and figuring it out. I am driven by the fact that I have this job, that it couldn’t be a better fit. The people who publish me want environmentalist content. I can do all the different angles on it, so I’m just reading environmental news constantly. I’m steeped in it. That article you read was about Costa Rica, right? And I’m in deep denial too, really. I’m able to function based on what I’m looking at in front of me in the moment. I could just run screaming, or drink myself to death, or try to numb myself to how bad things are, right? But the drawing is my activity, my action. It makes me feel like at least I’m doing something. But the more I do comics about this, the more I feel the absurdity of it.

Like I’m attacking the fact that the people at COP [the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] say that by 2030, well, blah, blah, blah. Say whatever kicks the can down the road, and it’s just all complete bullshit. Or British Petroleum reversing their decision to move away from fossil fuels because “our shareholders,” blah, blah, blah. So we’ve completely abandoned any real climate strategy. And now with Trump in there, everybody’s abandoning it. And digging into those Exxon studies going back 50 years, you can see they absolutely knew where we were going. And they were, like, “Full speed ahead!” They and their lawyers are a lot more concerned with finding ways they can’t be sued by the public. “It’s our fault, but don’t sue us!” So they get laws in place so you can’t touch them, and they get regulations removed. I’m steeped in that. And maybe in the same way that the bomb motivated me when I was younger, like “I gotta get my book published before they drop the bomb,” now it’s the environmental crisis. I feel like I’m running, with a tsunami right on my heels. My running is drawing.

JA: This is so illuminating, because you’re saying that you’re not necessarily mentally healthy. Who is, really, in the Anthropocene? It’s just that your particular version of managing your anxieties or issues is to channel them into your work.

PK: Well, I have limits. There’s still certain people that I can’t handle listening to. I see them on the news or whatever, they’re even more into the “We’re fucked” narrative than I am. It’s a little too much. I don’t want to just sound like a doom-and-gloom preacher. So I use humor in there. I try to give things a twist. That’s going to give you some … not necessarily an exit, but maybe it has some weird lift in the torque of it. Humor is definitely a part of that. I’m not angry with people for getting overwhelmed. I completely understand how they feel. But we should all still be doing something. Don’t bury your head in the sand. Give money, do something. Don’t just be like, “I don’t want to think about it, so I’m just going to pretend that everything is fine.” That’s usually somebody wealthy that says that.

JA: One more quick question about Insectopolis in particular. I did see the show at the Society of Illustrators, and I got a clear sense that the physical environment of that gallery is a big part of how you are presenting the art, like the art’s inhabiting the space, sort of. Please talk a bit about the show and about what you wanted to do with it.

 PK: It’s like another stage to me. Like when I do a graphic novel, I’m trying to make some of that stuff leap off the page. I’m still thinking in sequential terms, like, when the butterfly is “flying” up the stairs, animating it. I’m trying to give a sense of the stages; as you’re walking up the stairs, you’re going from Canada to Mexico. When you’re coming down the stairs, there’s birth imagery, and then you look up, and there’s, you know, a butterfly up here. And your last image as you leave is this migrant worker looking up at the butterfly. Seeing the show you’re going through time, through different periods of natural history: the dinosaurs, the Middle Ages, etc. It’s taking the content from the book and putting it into a wider space. Like a giant diorama.

 I take something from murals, too. A Diego Rivera mural is a comic! It has a narrative to it. Your eyes can move around to follow recurring characters, and in the space of the exhibit you physically move around. I enjoy the different forms this material can take. I drew those ants on the wall, on my hands and knees! I can see myself going more in this direction.

 JA: Again, those cartoon insects really inhabit that space. It’s like a pop-up book. In fact, it makes me think what more you could do with a dedicated space, like the Museum of Natural History, where the art would be constantly all around you.

 PK: Well, about the Museum of Natural History, stay tuned …

 JA: Beautiful. That’s the ultimate pop-up book, right?

 

José Alaniz (University of Washington) is author of Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature (2025).

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[i] Tess McClure. “‘Half the Tree of Life’: Ecologists’ Horror as Nature Reserves are Emptied of Insects.” The Guardian (June 3, 2025). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-aoe. 

Exhibit Review: Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis

  Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis: A Natural History. New York: Society of Illustrators. May 14 - September 20, 2025. https://societyillustrators.org/event/insectopolis/

reviewed by José Alaniz

 

The late naturalist and myrmecologist E. O. Wilson casts a long shadow over the exhibit Peter Kuper’s Insectopolis: A Natural History, and indeed over much of the celebrated cartoonist’s environmentalist-themed recent works, such as the new non-fiction book of the same name (2025) which inspired the exhibit and the graphic novel Ruins (2015). So it makes sense that Wilson would get star billing at the show, via a prominently-placed (and famous) quote: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. But if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”[i]

That pretty much encapsulates Kuper’s stance towards the insect world: one that exists in parallel with ours, closely overlapping it, while remaining for the most part unseen. Yet (as Wilson’s quote also implies) that parallel world is under threat like never before in the last ten millennia, i.e., since humans started mucking up the planet. Catastrophic biodiversity loss — including of insects — is a feature, not a bug (sorry) of late industrial capitalism. It didn’t have to be this way, but it seems we moderns have forced a choice between economic prosperity and a livable, breathable biosphere. Not the brightest move, as our descendants will likely conclude, and as some today are already screaming to deaf ears.

Anyway, Insectopolis (the show and, for that matter, the book) stands as a rebuke to that sort of thoughtlessness, inviting the visitor to open their eyes to the dazzling, astonishing diversity and profundity of arthropod life on this shining blue orb. “There are estimated 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects,” says a helpful label. “That’s 1.25 billion for every person on Earth.”

Kuper has loved bugs for a long time (there’s even a photo of him as a nine-year-old, contemplating a moth), but the exhibit had its origins when the artist was researching his book at the New York Public Library as a 2020-2021 Jean Strouse Cullman Fellow. Pandemic-era restrictions meant he spent a lot of time on his own, exploring the renowned, and now virtually-empty library. The depopulated site suggested to him a post-apocalyptic setting, which he took up for the book’s framing sequence (seemy Kuper interview). Kuper also created an exhibit of the work-in-progress, called “INterSECTS,” in part of the library.[ii]

The second floor gallery of the Society of Illustrators is a rather different space. Cozier. You have to negotiate more corners. It can get crowded fast. But the tight confines work quite well to suggest almost a hive-like structure, like you’re traversing a giant termite colony. (This is probably not the best show for claustrophobes.)

That feeling of compactness begins at the narrow stairs; you have to let someone come down before you can go up. There are colorful monarch butterflies glued to the front of each step, leading you on. Kuper has lined the wall of the staircase with prints from the monarchs’ journey in Ruins, as well as with maps showing their 3,000-mile migration from North America to a pine forest in Mexico. It might make you feel like you yourself are on the precipice of a long journey.

That journey takes you through vast tracts of time as well as space, from the comet cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, through all of Homo sapiens history, East and West, North and South, above and below ground, in the skies and in the oceans. Insects are everywhere, and they’ve been around forever (or it might as well be forever: since the Devonian period, over 400 million years ago). That’s a lot to cover.

Kuper breaks that daunting story into sections, some with whimsical names, that focus on particular insects and/or the people who studied them: Cicada’s Brood, Ant Farm, Bee Kind, Entomologists and Naturalists. Among the latter you’ll find both the usual suspects (Rachel Carson, Margaret Collins, Alexander von Humboldt) and for some, the unexpected (Osamu Tezuka!). QR codes link you to the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis reciting his poem “A una Mariposa Monarca,” to evolutionary biologist Jessica Lee Ware discussing dragonflies, to professor of Entomology Barrett Anthony Klein dishing on dung beetles. (Kuper carried over these QR codes from the book.)

There are lots of other amusing touches, such as a reproduced ad for an ant farm, the sort the young Kuper would have sent away for. Throughout the space, monarchs seem to flutter above on the ceiling, all over the walls, even in the men’s room. Some of these prints stand out in relief, casting shadows against the surfaces to which they adhere. Kuper also drew a line of ants directly on the wall. In fact, cartoon insects inhabit much of the real estate not already taken up by Kuper’s framed artwork.  

That artwork, of course, is the real star of the show. It’s always a delight to get up close to comic art, to see what an artist inks and what they leave as pencils, how much they erased, what they corrected on the page vs. what they will fix or alter in digital. It doesn’t hurt at all that Insectopolis features Kuper’s most meticulous, elaborate drawing, from Cretaceous-era foliage to the classical facades of the NYPL. And lots and lots of lovingly-rendered bugs. I was quite charmed (and saddened) by a page from Insectopolis’ cicada section, of said creature burrowing up over four vertical panels, only to discover that, while it was hibernating over the last 17 years, humans had tarmacked its path forward. It got Aida’ed.

I also appreciated a color nightscape of lightning bugs placed in the “Nabokov niche,” with a quote from the famous Russian-American novelist/lepidopterist: “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple — these are our faithful timekeepers” (this quote concludes the book version of Insectopolis).^[iii] Not all the art, incidentally, is tied to Insectopolis or Ruins. Kuper throws in his 2009 portrait of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.  

A labor of love from a fully committed artist with a mission to educate, Insectopolis is a small but terrific show. Of course, for all Kuper’s herculean efforts, the exhibit can only begin to hint at the aforementioned dazzling, astonishing diversity and profundity of arthropod life on this shining blue orb. It’s the perfect companion piece, nay, extension to the book; almost like a wonderful pop-up version brought to life.

“I hope this exhibition will open visitors up to a newfound appreciation of these tiny giants that help make our world go around,” Kuper says in his artist statement. To give the visitor a sense of all we are losing as our insect biosphere contracts, as we keep putting development over butterflies, Insectopolis presents us with an artistic ecosystem, modest in scale but vast in meaning.

 

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[i] A simplified version of a passage from Wilson’s The Diversity of Life (1992).

[ii] Peter Kuper’s “INterSECTS” took place January 12–August 13, 2022 in the Rayner Special Collections Wing of the  NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The famous one, with the lions.

[iii] The quote comes from Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. 

Graphic Novel Review: Heartcore by Štěpánka Jislová

 Štěpánka Jislová, translated by Martha Kuhlman.  Heartcore. Graphic Mundi, 2025. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-090-8.html

reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

 

While reading Štěpánka Jislová’s extraordinary graphic memoir Heartcore, which deals exhaustively with her love life’s travails, more than once I was reminded of this passage from an early-2000s Laura Kipnis polemic against love:

 

Love is, as we know, a mysterious and controlling force. It has vast power over our thoughts

and life decisions. It demands our loyalty, and we, in turn, freely comply. Saying no to love

isn’t simply heresy; it is tragedy
— the failure to achieve what is most essentially human. So

deeply internalized is our obedience to this most capricious despot that artists create

passionate odes to its cruelty, and audiences seem never to tire of the most deeply unoriginal

mass spectacles devoted to rehearsing the litany of its torments, fixating their very beings on

the narrowest glimmer of its fleeting satisfactions (“Love”).[i]

 

Indeed, Heartcore is an intense, sobering, and at times hilarious deep dive into 21^st-century love and relationships — or at least into a lot of things that people call love and relationships. And this is key: an irreducible ambiguity lies at the heart of Heartcore’s subject. As the author’s avatar informs us in a prologue: “This is a love story.” On the next page, though, she amends the line so that it reads, “This is a love break-up story.”

That clears things up.

Jislová, who graduated from the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň, has built a strong reputation in Czech comics over the last fifteen years. Apart from contributing art to serious historical projects like The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016, written by Pavel Kosatík) and the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020, written by Zdeněk Ležák), she also does decent superhero satire, as seen in her scripts for Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdinové na dluh, 2023, art by Viktor Svoboda). She won the Muriel Award (the Czech comics industry’s highest prize), for her art on the graphic memoir Bald (Bez Vlasů, 2021; English translation 2024), a collaboration with writer Tereza Čechová.[ii] Two years later she released Heartcore (Srdcovka, 2023; English translation 2025), widely regarded as the first full-length single-author Czech comics memoir. It won that year’s Muriel for best comics work.

Graphic memoir has existed for quite a while in Western Europe, Japan and the US but has only recently emerged in the Czech comics scene.[iii] As we know, comics has a deep well of resources for the practice of putting oneself down on paper in words and (perhaps more critically) pictures — what Gillian Whitlock and others term autographics:  

 

The signature of autobiography is transformed in autographics’ touch on the page, and

memoir makes demands that draw deeply on the provenance of the comics in return. Here,

autobiography escapes the rigid confines of truth, authenticity and a singular coherent subject

and discovers the potential of comics’ multimodal visual/verbal pyrotechnics to transform

self-representation (238).

 

Jislová, who grew up with comics, clearly grasps their potential for authorial self-examination; she produces an at times startling memoir on the vagaries of the heart and loins, one in its own way worthy of Aline Kominsky-Crumb or Phoebe Gloeckner — though she’s never as explicit. (Few are). Stylistically and thematically, this is more mainstream fare, but it’s also more wide-ranging than its illustrious predecessors; by the end she’s gone beyond her own vexed relationship issues to explore society itself’s enthrallment to Kipnis’ “most capricious despot.”

So, first and foremost, we should commend publisher Graphic Mundi and translator Martha Kuhlman for bringing to English-language readers such a groundbreaking work by a renowned creator from Central Europe. Such publications remain all too rare.[iv]  

That said, I want to put on the table now my one objection to the approach utilized in this instance to transform Jislová’s Srdcovka (a Czech word denoting something near and dear to one’s heart which one recognizes as somehow flawed) into Heartcore. Kuhlman’s strong and supple translation, presumably in a bid to “de-exoticize” the original for non-Czech readers, anglicizes most of the characters’ names such that Štěpánka (pronounced SHTYE-pan-ka) becomes “Stephanie” and Michal (pronounced MEE-khal) becomes “Mike,” etc.[v] Put me down as one against such “localization” of foreign language literary texts in the name of familiarity.

Decisions like this, I realize, often do not fall to translators, but to presses wary of weird foreign names spooking away target readers. This strategy tends to backfire, though, when famous people are mentioned in the text. I would imagine it’s jolting to anglophone readers, after 150 pages of “Stephanie” and “Mike,” to see actual Czech names like Bohumil Kulínský (choirmaster turned child rapist), Eliška Stěpánová (proFem researcher) and Václav Havel (playwright/former Czech president). Reasonable people can disagree on this question, but in an ever-homogenizing, Western cultural imperialist world where the peculiar and local too often get retouched into whatever goes down easiest in the target market, I remain an adherent of comics scholar Kate Kelp-Stebbins’ mantra to “read for difference,” not sameness, when we engage with comic art far from our shores.

Sermon over.

In terms of its plot, Heartcore proceeds as a fairly standard memoir, one exceedingly focused on getting some. “I must find a boyfriend,” says Štěpánka (sorry, I will be using these people’s real names) (25). We follow our heroine through her middle-class upbringing in the post-communist Czech Republic. I was quite taken with a double-page spread of the neighborhood where she grew up, which many Central/Eastern Europeans will recognize as the legacy of Soviet-era planned economy housing policies: dilapidated concrete structures, a blocky quasi-brutalist health clinic, what the Czechs call paneláky (tall prefab apartment complexes), a Julius Meinl supermarket and a run-down derelict which Jislová labels “???” (26-27).

From an early age, Štěpánka gloms onto two things in a big way: popular culture (including comics and anime) and the stringently policed gender roles she comes to understand everyone must embrace. For example, she loves larping (live-action role-playing) and does it well, but a group of boys forbid her from playing with them when they realize she’s a girl (21). Even her beloved fantasy settings are not immune to the real world’s arbitrary rules. In fact, she ultimately realizes that these immersive fictional worlds were teaching her all along “what a love relationship is” (Aragorn and Arwen), “what best friends are like” (the Czech series Fast Arrows),[vi] “what a group of friends is like” (the Harry Potter series) (195).

But when it comes to relationships, life ain’t Lord of the Rings. For Štěpánka love and desire become hopelessly entangled with status (something she also obsesses over), with FOMO, with a fiction-fueled quasi-performative suffering. “Having a crush is terrible but not having a crush is terribly boring,” she writes in her sketch journal (55). This becomes the grand theme of our heroine’s life, all through art school, problems with alcohol abuse and beyond. It has closely proscribed limits, but Jislová’s professed honesty is unflinching. She doesn’t shy from presenting her young self as vain, shallow, prone to judging others, and selecting partners mostly based on how well they will prop up her self-image. All this leads to the excruciating on-again/off-again purgatory existence of life with Michal, the attractive guy who refuses to commit, the one who after sleeping with her provides enough of an ego-boost for her to think, “I guess I’m not that ugly after all” (65).[vii] The one who over and over breaks her heart because he’s not in touch with his own feelings. The one who leads her on for years. “If I can’t have a boyfriend,” she muses, “he’s the next best thing” (77).    

Fig 2. ‘How Does Anxiety Attachment Arise?’ 

From the didactic portion of Heartcore.

 

The repeated disasters that ensue eventually lead to Heartcore’s most remarkable narrative strategies. Pushing at what we usually mean by “memoir,” for a chapter Jislová radically switches perspective to that of Michal himself (echoing the structure of Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying [2007]).[viii]

Then she abandons conventional narrative altogether, turning to a didactic section exploring Attachment Theory, in which she uses material from her own life and her many tools as a cartoonist to make the tutorial come alive. This portion most resembles Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), though it’s a lot less wordy and has a lot more pop psychology. While some might find the shift jarring, Jislová insisted to me in interview that she wanted her readers to come away with something more than just her own individual story; she wanted to teach them something so they could connect the dots in their own lives. “[I]f I hadn’t put it in there, I would feel like it’s incomplete, like I had planted the seed, but never showed the flower,” she told me. One gets the sense, achingly, that in these concluding sections the author is trying to penetrate as deeply as possible into the mysteries that have brought her where she is – where we all are – to gain some measure of self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-love.

Heartcore left this reader with many stimulating impressions and associations. Here are some of them.

Women navigating a patriarchal world they never made is a lot like a horror movie; it’s basically Men (d. Alex Garland, 2022), the Jesse Buckley-starring feminist version of Get Out (d. Jordan Peele, 2017).

Similarly, some people are terrified of not being in a relationship, of being alone with their own selves and thoughts. They really should ask themselves why.  

Both social convention and instinct fuel love mania. As the droning teacher in the Ukrainian high school drama Stop-Zemlia (d. Kateryna Gornostai, 2021) puts it: “If we take a look at the processes in the brain of a person in love, modern science says it can be compared to a stress reaction. But only at the beginning. In this case, the biggest changes occur in the subcortical structures, which are referred to as reward centers.” Later on she says, “Enough about love, let’s get back to reality.” Exactly.

Social media has by now utterly warped multiple generations’ views of love, dating, desire, the whole shebang. It has normalized cyberstalking, encouraged people to treat each other as disposable objects, made the already fraught processes of finding companionship even more cringe-worthy and fatally banal. I’m hardly the first to say this. Štěpánka in one scene tells a guy there won’t be a second date — by e-mail as she’s walking away from him (72). The internet makes cowards of us all. It’d be funnier if it weren’t so tragic. This is what Kant warned us about, centuries before the first dating app: don’t use each other as means to ends. You’ll be sorry.   

Our romantic preferences come from all over the map; an inscrutable mishmash of random experiences and things we saw on TV at an impressionable age. In Jislová’s case, it was men with long hair, comics, John Malkovich, fantasy media, manga, anime, teen mags (“What turns him on the most?”), internet porn, Erich Fromm. It’s a wonder anyone at all survives into adulthood with a well-adjusted attitude.

Modern coupling is subsumed under a vicious economy of status, whereby you sleep with someone more than anything else to uphold your own self-worth and then brag-text to your friends about it. “I lost interest in that guy almost immediately,” our heroine muses on the tram ride home. “My idea of relationships didn’t go beyond what had just happened. The only thing that made me happy was reaching a new milestone. Mission accomplished” (39).  

Self-aware to a fault, the author of Heartcore also does a great job of skewering the transparent motives of others. Hilariously so. A clingy, whiny date follows her home and into her bed; she almost gives in out of pure irritation (74). It’s disturbing, pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny – Kominsky-Crumb for the 21^st century.[ix] A familiar brand of insipid metrosexual male comes for special abuse: “They’re all feminists until a woman says no” (99).

Fig 4. ‘I am so lonely.’

The tone at times borders on apocalyptic: “I can’t connect with others. I feel like a stranger even to myself. The whole time with Michal, I thought I was happy. Because to be in love means to be happy. But the reality is that our entire relationship was torture” (200). Štěpánka broods on these thoughts while walking in a dark wood midway through her life, like Dante’s traveler. But the lines themselves could almost have come from Kipnis.

The foregoing would make Jislová a talented memoirist – but what makes Heartcore a terrific graphic memoir is her excellent cartooning. I’ve had some reservations about her rendering in the past,[x] but here she loosens her style, making it more flexible and subtle, especially in facial expressions. At the same time, the “mask-like” cartoony visages convey her heroine’s problems with authentic expression, as Jislová told an interviewer (Fraňková). Somewhat reminiscent of Dave Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp (2009), her drawings also reflect the influence of Georgia Webber, Kate Beaton, Ellen Forney and Tillie Walden, among others.

She makes another wise choice with the color scheme: exclusively blue, red and their various shades. “By using two colors you can emphasize emotions, you can emphasize certain panels and in that way you can explain things very efficiently, in my opinion, precisely because you have a very limited set of tools” she said in the same interview (Fraňková). Plus, of course, there’s the gendered heteronormative connotations of those two colors. The image of Štěpánka isolated, alone and maybe a little horny at a crowded party (as seen on the book’s cover) comes across all the more boldly through those color contrasts. The red along with the shape and placement of her figure suggest a heart, too (“srdcovka” is derived from “srdce,” or heart).

Fig 3. Štěpánka’s world falls apart.

Jislová’s cartooning shines brightest in her rendering of charged and traumatic emotional states. When Michal rejects Štěpánka’s overtures for commitment (not for the first or last time), her world literally shatters. We see her sitting in a café, stolid, tears welling up, the only color the red of her hair and blouse (plus a few incidental patches). From one panel to the next, the hueless background (café patrons and all) collapses into fragments, like glass (124). This “fractured” composition recalls Winsor McCay’s famous Little Sammy Sneeze of September 24, 1905, in which the tyke destroys his own panel borders with another epic sternutation. But here no one is laughing. 

Fig 5. Štěpánka at different ages, all 

rationalizing her late father’s emotional distance.

 

Another page design shows six successive full-body images of Štěpánka as she progressively falls on her knees against the giant light red words “I am so lonely” (76). Later, hearing of her father’s death by cell phone, she appears at four different ages, all in a row from adult to girlhood, making up the middle tier. At each “stage” she rationalizes her father’s lack of involvement in her life: “He loves me, even though he won’t spend time with me,” muses the child-Štěpánka (146). Many of these affectively heightened pages have no backgrounds, underscoring a void-like alienation/disorientation, be it of modern love, grief or family dysfunction.

The most powerful of these “minimalist,” negative space-heavy designs shows a full-page splash of Štěpánka and Michal in an odd “puzzle piece” configuration, touching fingertips but otherwise completely estranged: facing in opposite directions, upside down relative to each other, with empty expressions – a disturbing, deep-freeze portrait of intimacy (205). Love really can feel like an unsolvable puzzle sometimes.  

Fig 6. Štěpánka and Michal in the “puzzle piece” page.

Just as the author leaves it for the latter half of her memoir, so have I held off until now discussing Heartcore’s “Part Zero,” which details in harrowing (but not graphic) detail Jislová’s childhood sexual assault at a summer camp. The entire chapter is told almost entirely in bright, glaring red tones; it’s hard to read in more ways than one.

Here Jislová’s work bears comparisons to that of Katie Green’s Lighter Than my Shadow (2013), Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2015) and Megan Kelso’s “The Golden Lasso,” part of the collection Who Will Make the Pancakes? (2022). As Frederik Byrn Køhlert writes in reference to Phoebe Gloeckner’s oeuvre, the political act of showing hidden sexual abuse in comics form “not only make[s] the case for the potential of the form to serve a therapeutic purpose but also illustrate[s] the problem of adequately representing an autobiographical self that is both fragmented and under duress” (82-83). Štěpánka’s journey as a survivor more than validates that observation.   

Fig 7. An abstract composition from Heartcore’s 

‘Part Zero,’ on the author’s sexual abuse.

 

And while some readers might take this terrible incident as a sort of key to understanding her later relationship struggles, Jislová herself resists such blunt reductionism. That said, both the episode itself and perhaps more crucially, the unwillingness of so many in Štěpánka’s life to openly discuss it, certainly leaves scars. Her rapist’s infuriating rationalizations for his crime are no help; they’re also banal tripe oft-repeated by sexual abusers.[xi] But again, what makes Heartcore rise above other graphic memoirs dealing with sexual abuse is how Jislová eventually turns the focus away from her own individual story to discuss rape statistics and the rampant rape culture in the Czech Republic (e.g., the aforementioned Kulínský).  

She gains a measure of closure when, late in the book, the grown-up Štěpánka tears up a letter from her rapist (years later he’s still making excuses). The shredded paper flies off into the ether in a million little confetti pieces. “I don’t need someone to believe me,” she writes. “I was there” (207). I really like Kuhlman’s choices here; the literal Czech is something more like “I don’t need someone to believe me. I know that it happened.” The translator’s rendering is both better colloquial English and figuratively, hauntingly “takes us back” to the incident itself, even as Štěpánka shrugs its weight off her shoulders.

 It is a truth universally unacknowledged – especially around Valentine’s Day – that at the center of every love relationship is a power struggle; this is the thesis Kipnis returns to over and over in Against Love: A Polemic. Heartcore, while not a polemic, nonetheless dares to question the near-religious fervor which love and relationships (or at least what many people call love and relationships) inspires. The power issue rears its head here too, as when Štěpánka considers “every positive reaction” from Michal “a small victory” (86).

Fig 8. From the epilogue, in which Jislová 

discusses multigenerational trauma.

Once more, what I love about this memoir is how it repeatedly goes from our protagonist’s particular experience to the wide-angle view, how – despite what some might consider its overly pedantic tone – it overtly seeks to teach us something crucial about the world we’ve made for ourselves. The penultimate page of the epilogue really evinces that sense of mission, by expanding the scope to several generations and to all of present-day society. Three page-wide tiers show falling bullets (representing the lives of parents and grandparents touched by the world wars) and various kinds of debris (to underscore the lack of attention paid to mental health). This historical context is key, Jislová implies, to understanding modern interpersonal relations. Yet as she also then notes, “What is lacking – for both genders (but not always) – often takes on specifically gendered forms,” namely the lack of healthy anger for women and a lack of opportunity to express their full emotional spectrum for men (230). Both suffer for it – though of course there remain power imbalances to account for.

Here Jislová and the author of Against Love might agree: in our utter submission to that “most capricious despot,” we sometimes lose sight of the big picture.

“Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is,” Kipnis archly reminds (Against: 49).

In a world so besotted with relationship mania – where you’re either paired off or you’re a loser – what would we spend our time on otherwise, one might dare to wonder.

Heartcore certainly does.

  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Alaniz, José. Bald review. International Journal of Comic Art. Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2024): 516-523.

 Aviv, Rachel. “Alice Munroe’s Passive Voice.” The New Yorker (December 23, 2024). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice.

 Fraňková, Ruth. “Heartcore: Award-winning Graphic Novel Examines Modern-day Relationships.” Radio Prague International (March 12, 2024). https://english.radio.cz/heartcore-award-winning-graphic-novel-examines-modern-day-relationships-8811072.

 Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. Knopf Doubleday, 2003.

 —. “Love in the 21^st Century; Against Love.” The New York Times Magazine (October 14, 2001). https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/magazine/love-in-the-21st-century-against-love.html.

 Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. Rutgers UP, 2019.

 Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics.” Comics Studies: A Guidebook. Ed. Charles Hatfield & Bart Beaty. Rutgers UP, 2020: 227-240.

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[i] Kipnis later reworked this language for an early section of her 2003 book Against Love: A Polemic. That version reads: “Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions. Love is boss, and a demanding one, too: it demands our loyalty. We, in turn, freely comply — or as freely as the average subject in thrall to an all-powerful master, as freely as indentured servants. It’s a new form of mass conscription: meaning it’s out of the question to be summoned by love, issued your marching orders, and then decline to pledge body and being to the cause. There’s no way of being against love precisely because we moderns are constituted as beings yearning to be filled, craving connection, needing to adore and be adored, because love is vital plasma and everything else in the world just tap water. We prostrate ourselves at love’s portals, anxious for entry, like social strivers waiting at the ropeline outside some exclusive club hoping to gain admission to its plushy chambers, thereby confirming our essential worth and making us interesting to ourselves” (Against: 3). 

[ii] See Alaniz, “Bald.”

[iii] See my interview with Jislová elsewhere in this volume; we get into that. Also of note in the development of Czech autobio comics is Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022).   

[iv] Kuhlman is the hardest working translator of Czech comics into English. She has previously translated Čechová/Jislová’s Bald and an excerpt from Džian Baban and Vojtěch Mašek’s monumental graphic novel series Fred Brunold’s Monstercabaret Presents (Monstrkabaret Freda Brunolda uvádí, 2004-2008), also known as the Damian Chobot trilogy; see here: https://www.shenandoahliterary.org/74-1-2/stop-making-sense-an-introduction-to-i/. Full disclosure: Kuhlman and I edited the collection Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (University of Leuven Press, 2020). She provided me with a copy of Heartcore for review.   

[v] This has been happening with translations of Slavic literature for a long time. Let’s take the case of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867) as sordidly illustrative. The celebrated early translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, done in consultation with the author, yields such ugly English/Russian chimeras as “Andrew Nikolayevich Bolkonski” and “Nicholas Ilyich Rostov.” Would it really have burdened anglophone readers so much to be exposed to the Russian names Andrei and Nikolai? They’re close enough to their English equivalents, aren’t they?

[vi] Fast Arrows (Rychlé Šipy) was a boy’s adventure comics series created by writer Jaroslav Foglar, first published in 1938. Several artists worked on it over the decades; the first was Jan Fischer.

[vii] Comics emphases in original.

[viii] The parallels with Pretending is Lying are stark, though Jislová’s portrait is more for mainstream consumption than Goblet’s expressionistic masterpiece. Like her Belgian predecessor, Jislová collaborated with Michal on his section (Fraňková), just as Goblet collaborated with her problematic partner Guy Marc Hinant for the chapters focalized on him. While we may not like these male partners any better after reading their portions, we maybe come to understand them better. In Heartcore one definitely gets a sense of how men from an early age are put into an emotional straightjacket by the same gender role ideology which besets our heroine. Incidentally, today Jislová is married to Michal (again, see my interview with her).    

[ix] Compare it, for example, to Kominsky-Crumb’s “The Young Bunch: An Unromantic Nonadventure Story” (Twisted Sisters #1, June, 1976). Closer geographically to Central/Eastern Europe, see also Russian cartoonist Alyona Kamyshevskaya’s graphic memoir My Sex (2014), which plays a ridiculously awkward date rape scene for giggles.

[x] See Alaniz, “Bald.” 

[xi] See for example the writer Alice Munroe’s partner, Gerald “Gerry” Fremlin, who molested her nine-year-old daughter. He justifies it by saying such revolting things as “I know there are Lolitas” (Aviv, emphasis in original).