“When You Erase Human Beings, It Starts To Get Weird”: A Jakub Woynarowski Interview

“When You Erase Human Beings, It Starts To Get Weird”:

A Jakub Woynarowski Interview

 

José Alaniz

 

Fig. 1. Jakub Woynarowski at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków. Wawel Castle in the background. Photo by José Alaniz.

 

Polish artist, Jakub “Kuba” Woynarowski (b. 1982) earned a Master’s degree at the Faculty of Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2007. He also finished his doctorate there in 2017. Today, Woynarowski directs the Narrative Drawing Studio at the AFA. He also works in design, installation art, comics, and museum curation, with a strong theoretical and visual arts focus. His many books include The Story of Gardens (2010), Corpus Delicti (co-authored with Kuba Mikurda, 2013), and The Dead Season (Martwy Sezon, 2014). Woynarowski’s accolades include the 2014 “Paszport” award from the weekly, Polityka, for his work on the Polish Pavilion at the 14^th Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Grand Prix at the International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź (the oldest, largest such event in Central/Eastern Europe) for his comics piece, “Hikikomori” (2007).

 

I met Woynarowski at the Ligatura Comics Festival in Poznań, Poland, in 2010. I have long found his work intriguing for how it operates at the intersection of comics, fine art, and posthumanism. While on a trip to Kraków in Summer 2024, I took the opportunity to see “Background,” an exhibit Woynarowski co-curated at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology (see review elsewhere in this issue). After he kindly gave me a guided tour, we sat down for an interview.

 

— José Alaniz

 

This interview was conducted in Kraków on June 23, 2024. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

José Alaniz:  You do a lot of different things in a lot of different media, but here, I’d like us to speak mostly about your comics-related work. Let’s begin with what you were telling me about your experience at the Academy of Fine Arts, where you teach narrative drawing. You mentioned you had to talk your superiors into letting you do it. 

Jakub Woynarowski:  It started in 2009, when a friend of mine, a professor at the academy who’s also a great fan of comics, invited me to take part in this initiative. We organized two different comics workshops in 2009 and 2010. We wanted to see how many students would be interested. Would there be a response to this subject? And there was--a huge response. We’re talking hundreds of people that contacted me about it. So, then we worked to convince them to open the studio. They resisted. We had proof that people were interested, so, it wasn’t about lack of students. The resistance came more from the idea that comics were not considered an art form.

JA:  Sounds familiar!

JW:  Yeah. They thought of it as “just” popular culture, mass culture. Because, you know, these people had no idea about the diversity of comic art. They thought, “How diverse could it be?” So, I showed them a lot of experimental stuff, like Richard McGuire, as well as fine artists who also do comics. I put together an assignment for the students, inspired by Chris Ware, to create their own hypertext comic with a non-linear structure. They did great. Very nice, very cool. They made abstract comics, wordless comics inspired by poetry. You can take something like Ware’s Building Stories (2012) as a model. Building Stories is a kind of hypertext in the sense that it’s made up of many different pieces in different formats, which you can read in any order. You have to piece it together in your mind. So, ultimately, we succeeded in implementing the program. I’ve led it from the time I got my Ph.D., in 2017.

JA:  Did you grow up in Kraków?

JW:  No, in a smaller city, Stalowa Wola, in Southeastern Poland. About three hours by car from Kraków. I came here for secondary school when I was 15. I’ve lived in Kraków ever since. Many of my friends moved to Warsaw, but I started to work here, and I found a good environment. Warsaw and Kraków are completely different. So, it depends on what your focus is, what you like and what you want to get done, that determines where you want to live. Warsaw is more busy; everything there is very fast.

JA:  My understanding has always been that Kraków is a better preserved city, while Warsaw was much more damaged during the war. You can totally see that; it’s a lot more medieval-looking here.

JW:  Right. In Kraków, the architecture is completely different, more historical, yeah. It’s a kind of hybrid situation. But you know, Kraków also has another city center far from the historical center, built under socialism.

JA:  I was there yesterday! I was in Nowa Huta.[i] I got to see the Beksiński[ii] permanent exhibit there. Pretty grotesque dystopian horror. What do you think of his work?

JW:  I like some of his works, especially the early ones. Some consider him a problematic artist because he switched from one field to another. He started as an avant garde artist and moved more into popular culture. Also, many people have other problems with him. I think he was an intriguing figure, because painting was only one of his interests. He was also a fascinating photographer; he created experimental audio art; he was a writer, a video artist documenting the process of creating the paintings. And, his commentaries were very ironic; he was conscious of what he was doing. So, maybe it’s kitschy, but I love it.

JA:  Also speaking of Nowa Huta, I was curious what you think of the pissing Lenin.[iii] It reminds me of David Černý.[iv]

Fig. 2. “Fountain of the Future” (a.k.a. Pissing Lenin) by Małgorzata and Bartosz Szydlowski (2014), in the Nowa Hura district of Kraków.

JW:  That came about during an international festival ten years ago. Many different artists were invited to Poland. They, along with Polish artists, created some artistic interventions in the public space of the city. You could link this type of irreverent art to movements in the Communist era that were making fun of official culture. Especially in the 80s, there were groups of artists inspired by punk and Pop Art.

 JA:  Right, in late Soviet Russia, you had Sots-Art, people like Komar and Melamid,[v] who were basically doing a version of Pop Art. So, when I saw pissing Lenin, I was very happy. Anyway, I was going to ask you:  how did you get into comics? Did it start in childhood or what?

 JW:  Yeah, as a child. My parents were interested in many different areas of art. Everything was mixed together:  comics, conceptual art, design. My father works in theater. At the local cultural center he runs a kind of amateur theater, but he also does some experimental stuff. My mother is a musician, but, also trained in visual arts. So, they were open to many different arts and approaches. In short, we had a lot of eclectic interests. And comics were part of my inspiration, especially Marvel Comics. Spider-Man.

 JA:  Any era or artist in particular?

 JW:  I really liked Todd McFarlane.

 JA:  So, like, the 80s/90s.

JW:  Yeah. I liked what he would do on the margins, all this strange stuff made of spider-web. Organic figures. Or Venom, with this black stuff all over the place. I used some of these elements in my own comics.

 JA:  Yeah, very Expressionist. Kind of like with your “Background” exhibit, it brings a lot of attention to peripheral matter. It displaces the center, so to speak.

 JW:  Yeah. You remember, how at the beginning of the 90s, there were longer storylines being published, as well as graphic novels? I mean, for example, “Torment” by McFarlane[vi] or Weapon X.[vii] I really liked these books, because there were a lot of interesting structures in them. Weapon X had all these organic-looking adamantium things. I think that was Barry Windsor-Smith?

 JA:  Yeah. And so, at what point, did you start getting into the more explicitly experimental works and getting away from conventional narrative?

 JW:  I think I started doing that in secondary school. When I was in an arts school in Kraków, I started to make some traditional comics, with a cartoon style. But, at the same time, when I look at my school notebooks from back then, I see that I was starting to do some abstract things in the margins--inspired by, among others, McFarlane and popular comics. I just took some “unpopular” components from it. And, at the same time, I was getting interested in modern art.

 JA:  Pop Art?

Fig. 3. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Cow Going Abstract” (1982).

 JW:  Yeah, Pop Art and pop culture were also important for me. Probably more Roy Lichtenstein than Andy Warhol. But, I don’t just mean his most iconic works in comics style. I really like Lichtenstein’s still lives and his short sequences, like two or three images, which were basically short stories. For example, his lithograph, “Cow Going Abstract” (1982). Some of them look like technical instructions. I was also influenced by technical drawings and technical manuals. My early comics were like that. “Hikikomori” (2009), for example, was inspired by manuals, explanatory models. 

Fig. 4. Woynarowski’s “Hikikomori” (2009). Note Todd McFarlane influence.

JA:  What was it about these manuals that inspired you?

JW:  I really liked doing technical drawings when I was a child. We did them at school; it was mandatory. My friends hated doing them, but, I really liked it, because of its precision and this infographic structure that I thought was so nice. I started turning these single drawings of objects into sequences of images.

 JA:  Was it the seductive nature of the object? A sense of perfection?

 JW:  I’d say so, yeah.

 JA:  That cleanliness and polished finishedness of the machine, of the clean graphic drawing, that’s the opposite of messy corporeality, right?

 JW:  Yeah, maybe.

 JA:  That’s, at any rate, how your work makes me feel. Flesh is so … disorganized and runny compared to the perfect, solid integrity of the machine. I’m reminded of Kafka, who, well, he did also make drawings. But, specifically in his prose work, he seems to have been very affected by working for this insurance company and going to the sites of industrial accidents. How puny the human body seemed compared to those huge, powerful, metal machines, which ripped off flesh and limbs like they were paper! You definitely get that sense of horror when you read the reports he wrote for his insurance company. I remember one about wood-planing machines that had illustrations of hands with missing fingers.[viii] It was very disturbing, not only because of the subject matter, but because the language was very official and bureaucratic--and very, very clear. I’m not the first to say it, but his job really affected his view of the world and his art.

Fig. 5. Franz Kafka’s “Accident Prevention Regulations on the Use of Wood-Planing Machines,” written for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, where he started working in 1908.

 JW:  It’s funny you mention Kafka, because before “Hikikomori,” the very first short comics work which I finished, was an adaptation of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1919)--which is exactly about a machine that tortures people! Kafka is definitely also one of my influences. The other thing, of course, is that Kafka’s modern vision, expressed in “The Penal Colony,” is very much a kind of posthuman vision, a decentering and displacement of the human. The human is no longer on top. We can relate this to Michel Carrouges’ book, The Bachelor Machines (Les Machines Célibataires,1954), inspired, among others, by Kafka. He was writing about machines which worked for their own sake.[ix] It becomes a closed circuit; a form of perpetual motion. The centering and dominance of the machine. We see this, not only in Kafka, but also in Marcel Duchamp’s work, like his “Chocolate Grinder No. 1” (1913). Duchamp is also one of my inspirations, and Picabia,[x] with his machines, of course.

Fig. 6. Marcel Duchamp’s “Chocolate Grinder No. 1” (1913), a sort of “bachelor machine.”

 JA:  Is there anything particularly Polish about that sensibility, would you say? I’m thinking of you growing up in the last decade of Communism. I’m curious:  how do you think that affected your life and art?

 JW:  Well, as it pertains to Polish comics, I would say some came from Baranovski.[xi] Especially his writing. You know, it was intended for children, but his comics had a lot of meta-layers. He was playing with the medium itself, too, which had a political dimension, especially at that time. What he’s doing with layouts, the neologisms he creates, the frame within the frame, all these are vital parts of the world he’s created. It had an impact.

 JA:  What about Eastern European animation, especially the use of collage and things like that, as in Lenica’s “Labyrinth” (1963)?[xii] I see some of that in your work.

Fig. 7. Jan Lenica’s “Labyrinth” (1963), a classic of Eastern/Central European animation.

 JW:  Yeah. I did my diploma work at the Academy of Fine Arts’ animation studio. The Polish animation tradition is also important for me. My professor was Jerzy Kucia,[xiii] who did a lot of animation focused on objects, insects, and landscapes, always with a very clean graphic look. And these works are very rhythmic. They’re influenced by music and musical structures. Some of them resemble train travel, like the view from inside a moving train, with repeated elements. A lot like musical notes. My other inspirations are the Brothers Quay[xiv] (who were also influenced by the Polish animation school) and Jan Švankmajer.[xv] I guess I fall somewhere between Švankmajer and Kucia. The Quays, by the way, said they were really influenced by Walerian Borowczyk’s[xvi] object animation. I, myself, with a colleague, published a book on Borowczyk’s objects from his films.[xvii] And, I collaborated on a documentary about Borowczyk.[xviii] It was co-produced by HBO. We managed to get Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan, who knew Borowczyk, for it.

 JA:  Right, all these fascinating East-West connections, including Gilliam’s collage animation for “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” looking a lot like Eastern European object animation of the Lenica variety. It brings us back to that period:  late Communism. Obviously, those born after 1989 are less affected, but, for you, growing up in the last decade of Communism, do you think it affected your work? If so, how?

 JW:  It did. In many ways. Just the atmosphere, for example. There weren’t a lot of opportunities. You know, it was difficult to buy something interesting in the shops. You had to find it. And, it was a time when a lot of blocks of flats were being built. So, I lived in this environment. All these machines, and the construction sites, and the trash. Pieces of machines, pieces of metal, and weird debris. I didn’t know what it was. Then, I started to create my own structures. I built a robot-like sculpture when I was in primary school, using found materials. This is why I like readymade art, because it’s the same way of thinking. I’m still doing installations, and, yeah, it goes back to when I was a child, doing stuff like that. So, yeah, the period influenced me a lot.

 JA:  To get back to comics in particular, tell me about how it went once you started getting away from Todd McFarlane and more into alternative comics, in the 90s/2000s. Earlier, we were talking about Martin Vaughn-James’ The Cage (1975), for example. Did you discover that earlier or later, maybe in school?

 JW:  It’s funny, because some people compare my “Hikikomori” to The Cage, but, in fact, I made “Hikikomori” for the festival in Łódź in 2007. It won the Grand Prix. The prize was a trip to France. So, I traveled to Angoulême, and there, in a shop, I found The Cage!

When I was in secondary school, around the late 90s, beginning of the 2000s, there was a group of Polish fine artists born in the 70s, who were actively producing for galleries, but, at the same time, they were making comics. And, probably, they were one of the big influences for me. For example, Wilhelm Sasnal.[xix] He’s a quite famous Polish painter now, but when he started his work, he was working in Grupa Ładnie [Ładnie Group], which means, “the guys who are doing nice things.” “Ładnie” means nice, but, of course, here, it was ironic. It was a kind of Polish pop art mixed with 90s punk art zine aesthetics. And, it was sort of an art comic, like something Raymond Pettibon or Gary Panter might do. Those are probably the closest analogues.

What was important in their art is that they were focusing on daily life. It was very different from the mainstream comics scene in Poland in the 90s, because most of those comics were, you know, fantasy. Some fantastic alternate worlds, but not our daily life, which looked boring in comparison. But, I responded to these comics, because they presented that boring daily life as something very attractive and strange.

Fig. 8. Maus (2001-2015) by Wilhelm Sasnal, with art removed from (the Polish translation of) Spiegelman’s page.

Most of them are autobiographical. Sanal also focused on history, the Holocaust, Communism, all that. He even did a project inspired by Maus in Bielsko-Biała, a Polish town in which Spiegelman’s Maus partly takes place, where Artie’s parents are from. On this one page of the comic, he erased all the characters, leaving only the speech bubbles. And it’s a very dramatic moment, which really happened in that town, and it was mounted on the wall of one of the buildings where the action happened. It’s like a found footage comic project. Also site specific, because the place is important. He also creates a series of paintings inspired by Maus, the interiors of the concentration camp without any characters.^[xx]

 JA:  Yeah, again, that almost sounds like your “Background” exhibit, no?

Fig. 9. Vol. 2 of Marzena Sowa’s graphic memoir, Marzi, published in 2006.

 JW:  Absolutely. As for more mainstream autobio work, there’s Marzena Sowa.[xxi] Her work looks like pop comics. It’s very traditional, something intended for children, but not really. She also lived in my city at the same time I did, and created serious comics about her growing up there in the beginning of the 80s. When I see her comics, I get a strange feeling, because I recognize all these places and situations, since we shared the same childhood. It’s a different style, but I think we have much in common. We didn’t know each other back then, in the 80s, but we met 20 years later. As adults.

 JA:  Tell me about your own autobiographical work.

 JW:  Well, that would be my graphic novel, The Dead Season (Martwy Sezon, 2014). It was inspired by my childhood, living in a block of flats. It’s about an abandoned city, which looks a little bit like Pripyat, in Ukraine. The town near Chernobyl. So, it’s something between a Polish city and a hyper-Communist city near the nuclear plant, with no people. I recreated the places I knew, my block of flats. So a lot of like spaces and architectural drawing. And, it’s focused on the insects and weather, these kind of things, which was important to me, when I was interested in nature. My grandmother was a biologist, so she got me even more interested in nature, in biology. And I think her scientific books were another inspiration for me, books about biology with all these diagrams. Circle of life!

 JA:  One thing that’s always struck me is that when you draw insects or “messy” organic forms, they still have a very “clean” graphic line to them. Like Charles Burns’. Very ligne claire, even. There’s a sort of visual paradox there on some level.

 JW:  One more influence was Szpilki,[xxii] a satirical magazine published throughout the Communist era. “Szpilki” means pins or needles, little needles. It published a lot of experimental comics, especially in the 60s and 70s, some of them without characters. Jan Sawka,[xxiii] the famous Polish graphic artist and poster-maker; he also did some stories for them.

 JA:  Tell me more about this theme of focusing on objects. Surrealism, I take it? What attracts you to it?

 JW:  I do like an uncanny mood. When you erase human beings, it starts to get weird. Yes, it very much has roots in Surrealism. They used objects in such a way as to downplay their functionality. To see the object itself as something that lives its own life. I think my childhood was an important period for me as an artist. When I think more deeply about it, that was the source of most of my inspirations and later projects:  my relationship to inanimate objects.

 JA:  Right. What about now? You recently became a father. Has having a child altered your way of thinking? She’s also discovering the world, discovering objects, right? Do you observe your daughter doing that?

 JW:  Yeah. It’s a wonderful process. Maybe I’ll do an art project related to this phenomenon. I really like to watch when she brings her toys together into a large group, this mass of colorful things with no known function. It looks a little like an art installation. She mixes toys with found objects in the house. She’s interested in objects, which are not toys, which she uses in the same way as the toys. And, everything is mixed together and it’s a great mess. Like dust, she’s very interested in dust. Or some food she finds on the floor. She collects them together, dividing them into sets by color or something. She has a lot of actual toys, but, for people of my generation, during the Communist era, it was a little different. We would just go outside, into nature. We would find things, like a tree to climb. Or draw things we saw around us. We’d draw a right angle and that became a house. Or a circle would become something else. This is why I like diagrammatic structures. They represent space and the divisions of space, which reflects our way of thinking.

 JA:  That reminds me somehow of the films of Peter Greenaway, of all things.

 JW:  Yeah, I really like his films, especially, “The Draughtsman’s Contract” (1982), with the rectangular grid. I even made a fun footage film based on Greenaway’s “Contract.” I choose only the moments where people don’t appear at all. It’s a nice seven minutes when no one’s talking in the movie.

 JA:  Ha! That’s the Greenaway I was thinking about too. And your short film brings to mind one of my favorite essays on cinema, Michael Atkinson’s “Anna Karina and the American Night” (2008)[xxiv] and Christian Keathley’s book, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2005), both on the non-narrative aspects of cinema. It gets us back to a child’s vision, untrained vision that’s still determining what’s background and what’s foreground, what’s the point of view. That Romantic notion of untutored freedom. In a sense, these people-less, object-oriented works evoke the unconscious of narrative, of the art form. Posthumanism again!

 JW:  One of my students made a comic created from the point of view of an insect, which is moving along the walls and ceiling. And the perspective keeps changing. You have to rotate the book to follow along. You see only fragments of the narration; you have to reconstruct the whole story. It’s great.

 JA:  That sounds a little like Peter Kuper’s Ruins (2015), which is told partly from the point of view of a butterfly. It’s a fun way to get into the ecological crisis, biodiversity loss, climate  change.

Fig. 10. Woynarowski’s The Dead Season (2014).

JW:  Before, you were talking about climate change and all these things related to the Anthropocene. It made me think that my graphic novel, The Dead Season, is also dealing with that. It’s also about the ecological crisis, as well as my childhood. It combines different visions of apocalypse, including climate change and nuclear catastrophe. But, it’s also about a pandemic, a Coronavirus. It was created in 2014, so before the pandemic. You could also relate this theme to a recent popular trend in Polish visual arts, which are all these motifs related to death and undead creatures. To the fuzzy line between life and death.

Related to that, and getting back to superheroes, Tim Burton’s movies about “Batman” were a great inspiration for me. Especially “Batman Returns” (1992), which was more creepy than the first film. I was influenced a lot by the character of Scarecrow. I drew Scarecrow a lot as a child; it was one of the main motifs in my early art.

 JA:  What interested you about Scarecrow?

 JW:  Because it was something human and inhuman at the same time. You weren’t sure if there was a human inside the skin. I would draw him, trying to find the precise moment when it looks like an object. You know that there’s nothing inside the figure--just fabric and, you know, straw.

 JA:  Kind of like the Scarecrow from the “Wizard of Oz” (d. Victor Fleming, 1939). It really weirded me out as a kid when the flying monkeys attack the Scarecrow and rip him to pieces, and you see that he’s just made of straw. Very disturbing. He’s alive, but not alive. Uncanny!

 JW:  Yeah, you know, a more recent movie, “Midsommar” (d. Ari Aster, 2019), also plays with this effect. At the end, all these dead burning people look like scarecrows, because they are filled with straw. I remember seeing the film, thinking they look like puppets. It’s this uncanny figure of the scarecrow, it’s human and not human, alive and dead. Yes, disturbing!

---

[i] Funded by the Soviet Union, the socialist realist suburb of Nowa Huta rose up after World War II. The Communist authorities saw it as a showcase city, where 100,000 workers could live the good life thanks to central planning. Today, the district has residential areas, arts, and cultural centers. It forms quite the contrast to the familiar “gothic” Kraków that attracts more tourists.

[ii] Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) was a Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor, a master of dystopian surrealism. Some took his paintings as expressions of horror and despair under Communism. In 2016, a permanent exhibit of Beksiński’s works opened in the Nowa Huta Cultural Center.

[iii] The neon yellow-green statue, “Fountain of the Future” (a.k.a. Pissing Lenin), by Małgorzata and Bartosz Szydlowski, was unveiled during Kraków’s 6^th Grolsch ArtBoom Festival in 2014. It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek replacement for a mammoth and much-hated Communist-era Lenin statue in Nowa Huta’s central square, which was removed in 1989. After the festival, “Fountain” was moved to the rooftop terrace of the Utopia Home (Dom Utopii) International Empathy Center, a multi-use facility in Nowa Huta.

[iv] Visitors and residents of Prague will often run into the humorous public art works of Czech artist, David Černý (b. 1967). These include “St. Wenceslas” (2000), showing the medieval Czech king riding atop a dead, upside-down horse (hanging in the Lucerna building) and “Babies on the Tower” (2001), mounted on the Žižkov Television Tower.

[v] Russian conceptualist art duo, Komar & Melamid, made up of Vitaly Komar (b.1943) and Alexander Melamid (b. 1945), spearheaded the Sots-Arts movement in the late Soviet Union.

[vi] “Torment” formed the first story arc in Todd McFarlane’s mega-hit, Spider-Man (1990).

[vii] Barry Windsor-Smith’s story arc, “Weapon X” (on Logan/Wolverine of the X-Men), appeared in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84 (March-September, 1991).

[viii] See, “Accident Prevention Regulations on the Use of Wood-Planing Machines” in Franz Kafka:  The Office Writings. Corngold, S., et al., eds. Princeton University Press, 2009.

[ix] French writer, Michel Carrouges, coined the term, “Bachelor Machines,” for the many hypothetical contraptions and mechanical art pieces which emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which, among other things, he took as supreme examples of Freudian sublimation. He derived the term from Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” (The Large Glass) (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1911-25). In a famous 1976 Paris exhibit, Harald Szeemann brought some of these fictional works into the physical plane. See Chapter 4 of Constance Penley’s The Future of an Illusion:  Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (1989).

[x] French artist, Francis Picabia (1879-1953), was a major figure in the Dada and non-objective painting movements of the early 20^th Century.

[xi] Tadeusz Baranowski (b. 1945), a pre-eminent Polish comics artist, started publishing his work in 1975. Among the most famous are A Journey on the Dragon Diplodocus (Podróż smokiem Diplodokiem, 1986).

[xii] Jan Lenica (1928-2001), a major Polish cartoonist, graphic artist, and animator, directed the classic, “Labyrinth” (Labirynt, 1963).

[xiii] Award-winning animator, Jerzy Kucia (b. 1942), known for “The Return” (Powrót, 1972) and “Parade” (Parada, 1986), teaches in the Academy of Fine Arts Animated Film Studio in Krakow.

[xiv] British animation duo, the Brothers Quay, made up of Stephen and Timothy (both b. 1947), have shown a lot of Eastern European influence in their award-winning works, e.g., Street of Crocodiles (1986), based on a short story by Polish author, Bruno Schulz.

[xv] Surrealist Czech animator, Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934), influenced generations of artists in his home region and beyond, with remarkable works, such as “Dimensions of Dialogue” (Možnosti dialogu, 1983) and “Little Otik“ (Otesánek, 2002).

[xvi] Polish film auteur, Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006), produced porn-inflected art house cinema. He also dabbled in surrealist animation.

[xvii] Jakub Mikurda & Jakub Woynarowski. Corpus Delicti. Stowarzyszenie Nowe Horyzonty, 2013. See, also, “Animated Bodies:  A Conversation Between Kuba Mikurda and Jakub Woynarowski.” Boro, l’île d’amour :  The Films of Walerian Borowczyk. Kuc, Kamila, et al., eds. Berghahn Books, 2015.

[xviii] Love Express:  The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk (Love Express. Przypadek Waleriana Borowczyka, d. Kuba Mikurda, Poland/Estonia, 2018).

[xix] While primarily known as a successful Polish painter, Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972) has also produced cartoons for the periodicals Machina and Cross-Section (Przekroj).

[xx] Maus (2001-2015). Sasnal mounted the image on the exterior wall of the Gallery BWA in Bielsko-Biała. He had intended to mount it on a wall of the Museum of Technology, which was formerly a factory owned by the Spiegelman family. Permission was denied. The controversial Polish translation of Maus first appeared in 2001. Some objected to Spiegelman’s depiction of Poles as pigs, among other things.

[xxi] Marzena Sowa (b. 1979) published the graphic memoir series, Marzi, with art by Sylvain Savoia, starting in 2005.

[xxii] Szpilki was published from 1936 to 1994, with some interruptions (e.g., martial law restrictions in the 80s).

[xxiii] Jan Sawka (1946-2012) produced anti-government prints, paintings, and cartoons in Poland and emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s.

[xxiv] Published in The Believer. No. 52 (March 1, 2008). https://www.thebeliever.net/anna-karina-and-the-american-night/.

________________________

José Alaniz is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and has published academic books on Russian/Eastern European comics and other topics.

‘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).

---

[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. 

‘My Red Library’: A Štěpánka Jislová Interview

‘My Red Library’: A Štěpánka Jislová Interview

José Alaniz

  

Self-portrait from her website.

 

Štěpánka Jislová (b. 1992) graduated from the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň. She has published in several Czech and international comics collections. She also contributed to the monumental history comics series The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016) and illustrated the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020), written by Zdeněk Ležák. Her other credits include writing the superhero satire Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdinové na dluh, 2023) with 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. 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. This interview was conducted in Prague on June 20, 2024. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

 JA: So, as I understand the current Czech comics scene, starting in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, there was a very conscious strategy by people like Joachim Dvořak at Labyrint Press to tap into historical subjects and familiar literary tropes to entice readers, and to make comics more appealing to adults and not just to children. That of course happened in the States too, with works like Maus, etc., but here that approach really came to shape the Czech scene in a way it doesn’t elsewhere. More recently, thanks to state grants and foundation support, adult comics on historical or “sophisticated” literary subjects have come to take up a large part of a pretty small market, as compared to other countries. Even a book like Zátopek (2016),[i]  which many people I talk to don’t consider a good book; nonetheless it’s popular, it’s been translated into other languages. Works like that seem to define a safe, “patriotic” mainstream here. What do you think?

Fig 1. Cover to Zátopek, art by Jaromír 99.

 ŠJ: A lot of people ask me, on panels and such, what do I think about Czech comics? What is the state of Czech comics? I always feel like we spend so much time — and this is a generalization —  we spend so much time criticizing something because we want to make it better. But we could also take time to just enjoy, you know, the nice things. That’s how I feel about Czech comics. Especially now, it’s been pretty good the last few years. There’s so many big and small festivals. You can go to the freakin’ Comic Con, which is not that much about comics, but there are some comics and comic artists. You can go to a bunch of smaller cons, festivals located all over the country, not just in Prague. There are a bunch of art schools. There are tons of these little grants and the big grants from the Ministry of Culture. There’s the Czech Literary Center. There’s a bunch of smaller towns that offer residencies. All these small pieces, in my opinion, make the whole community healthy. Because if one of them decides to quit, or they get canceled, the whole thing doesn’t just collapse, right? Because that’s just one piece of a larger whole. And that to me is a healthy culture. Even when you go to a bookstore, you can get a book authored by a Czech artist that’s kind of almost like the Norwegian style of detective stories, right? Or you can get a story about children living in the Czech countryside playing superheroes. Or you can get historical stuff. It’s very diverse, and that’s what I like about it. It means you can go to someone and tell them, “Oh, you say you don’t like comics. That’s not because you don’t like comics; you just didn’t find the genre that you like, etc., etc.”

 JA: And for a country that’s much smaller than, say, Russia; that’s always fascinated me about Czechia. Another thing [Czech comics scholar] Pavel Kořínek would often bring up until recently is the one genre that was not that visible in Czech comics: autobiography. So a work like your Srdcovka is a relatively new phenomenon, in terms of a longer piece dealing with the author’s own personal life. Why do you think it took this long for books like yours to start emerging in this market? Why weren’t they around in, say, 1992?  

Fig 2. Cover to Lucie Lomová’s Every 

Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary. 

 

 ŠJ: That’s a good question, because there were a bunch of smaller works. There was one I remember about infertility, which was more of an illustrated book, I guess. Now there’s Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022). But that came out pretty recently. It’s a diary, so it’s definitely about her.

 JA: From what I understand, it was largely the state commission’s focus on historical subjects that led to so much nonfiction? I’m thinking of testimonial-driven works like We Are Still At War (Ještě Jsme ve Válce, 2011). Or even Alois Nebel (graphic novel trilogy by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99, 2003-2005), which is not nonfiction, but it’s very historically grounded. I myself was actually happy about the previous status quo. I was always telling Pavel that I think it’s kind of good that there’s not that much autobiography in Czech comics, because in US alternative comics there’s so much autobio. Too much, I think, sometimes. Of course we got that from the Undergrounds; ever since Justin Green and Robert Crumb’s work, it’s almost like the default is to see works by people who are mostly talking about themselves, about their first sexual experience, etc. I’ve seen a lot of material like that. So at least your book is good, at least you’re doing some interesting things. I’ve never read anything in comics that deals so much with wanting a relationship, but then also feeling even within a relationship a sense of deep estrangement, not connecting. And then, just the way you foreground how much weight people in modern life tend to put on relationships.[ii]

 ŠJ: I’m thinking about your question, why the Czech comics scene took longer to make this kind of material more prominent. It seems to me it takes a lot of time to make a book like this, because you need to grow up on similar books. That’s what happened to me, because I’m a big fan of Tillie Walden. I really like Kate Beaton’s Ducks (2022), which is also pretty recent.

 JA: And Alison Bechdel?

 ŠJ: Yeah. And when I look back on how the process felt, it was partially built on these books. Especially something like Fun Home (2006). Or the work of Ulli Lust, though she has a bit of a different approach, to be honest. A little more violent than me. And she’s not very introspective. She’s very grounded, very cold, almost, with her approach. Then there’s someone like Lucy Knisley. She’s doing something more … I don’t want to say entirely mainstream, but her work doesn’t have many edges. It’s just nice, right? So, yeah, I think you often need models to follow or not follow. And we had fewer of those models in Czech comics, historically. All the examples I gave you are foreign!

 JA: Clearly, like a lot of people, growing up you were well-plugged into global, or at least Western, comics trends. I’m also interested in what decisions you made in terms of representing the ‘90s/early 2000s. There’s that scene where she’s on the internet looking at porn. This was back when you would dial up for a connection on your computer. That’s become a pretty common way of representing the ‘90s, showing how the internet was slow and all that. But I was curious: did you have to go back and look at a lot of photographs?

 ŠJ: Yeah, I dug out my old diaries. The fashion and things like that you can get from photos, like school pictures. I did have to go back to look at old computer interfaces. I would still see them in my mind, but when I needed to replicate them on paper, it was quite hard. So just finding out how the little icons used to look was quite interesting, to see how the design evolved. I dug out a lot of magazines, especially ones targeted at teenagers, because they had a very specific vibe to them. They made very specific typography choices. But when it came to setting the stage, if you remember there’s a double-page spread that shows the neighborhood I lived in, which was mostly concrete.

 Fig 3/Fig 4. The two-page spread in Heartcore depicting the neighborhood where Jislová grew up.

 JA: Yeah. It’s more like a map.

 ŠJ: Yes. That I remembered perfectly; I didn’t have to look up anything, because that’s just burned into my mind.

 JA: The physical environment shown in that spread looks a lot like the Communist era.

 ŠJ: That makes sense. I was born in 1992, so there were still a lot of leftovers, in the architecture, in the material culture from the Communist period. And they stuck around for quite a long time. Like I said, I pretty much made the “map” from memory. Now, let me see: [pointing to  various structures on the spread] so these are the same, right? They’re a bit more colorful now. These playgrounds are different. This is gone. This is gone. This is kind of gone, and this has changed a lot. A lot of it is no longer present. And even when you look at the playgrounds, you know, they’re made out of wood now, not blocks of concrete.

 JA: Did you feel that with this project, you were creating a work driven by nostalgia? Thinking so much about when you were a child, were you re-experiencing a lot of feelings from that time?

 ŠJ: I’m not sure nostalgia is the term. I really looked at it more as, maybe, an autopsy? Yeah. So I really wanted to make a book where you can see the actions and reactions, how one thing can grow into another and then, by the end of the book, the reader can see how far things can go.  That’s why there’s an educational part to it as well. I got a few notes from different people, saying that when they got to the educational part, they it felt suddenly turned a bit too cold and clinical, like they had been reading along, feeling all these emotions and now there’s this sterile part when you’re supposed to learn something, and that it felt a bit like whiplash. But I was really adamant that I wanted to give the reader a tutorial in how they should read, based on the evidence in the book. So if 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.

 JA: It’s also fascinating to read this as a straight cis man. Of course, everybody’s been heartbroken, but here you’re also discussing a kind of toxic masculinity. In any case, I was curious about something else. In fact, you could write a whole other memoir about this, about how you were making comics from an early age. You don’t really talk about what got you into comics, or which comics you loved the most. You do mention manga and media about men with long hair. But in the interests of situating your work in Czech comics a little more, I was wondering, as you were growing up, how you related (if at all) to historically-based comics like Alois Nebel, which launched the so-called Czech boom around 2000.

 ŠJ: There were a lot of smaller projects, back then, and around 2000 they started publishing experimental French albums and stuff. The people who did that went bankrupt very quickly, but they published some really nice stuff. We also had a lot of Lewis Trondheim then. I loved his stuff when I was a teenager.

 JA: From what I understand, the Czech translation of Spiegelman’s Maus (1986-1991) in 1997 was also a big catalyst for artists here wanting to do more reality-based work.

 ŠJ: Yes, I like that a lot as well. And also a point can be made that the author appears throughout the work, so it’s partly a memoir, a hybrid. Of the Czechs, I also really liked Tomáš Kučerovský. He published about his stay in Singapore.[iii] I really loved it, because there were all these different styles, drawings as well as comics. You can see how he has an architecture background in every one of his lines. They’re very precise, lots of sharp angles. And I loved how descriptive it was. I think that was one of the biggest influences I had, just looking at his work.

 JA: What about Lomová, who was also around at that time, even in the ‘90s?

 ŠJ: I knew her fairy tales about the mice[iv] when I was a child, then I grew out of it. Later, when I saw her work for adults it actually took me a while to connect it back to her. I found some of her books in the mid-2000s, but I was too young to understand them. Anna Wants to Jump (Anna Che Skocit, 2006) is an adult graphic novel. I read that when I was maybe 15, and I thought it looked kind of familiar! And then I found out about Jiři Grus. As a comics artist he doesn’t have any competition in the Czech comics scene, I don’t think. He’s doing stuff that’s really somewhere high above everybody else.

 JA: What about Vojtěch Mašek, who is also very big now?

Fig 5. The cover to Vojtěch Mašek’s  

The Sisters Dietl.

 ŠJ: I found his stuff when I was older — or maybe I didn’t. I think I might have tried to read some of his work when I was younger, but … Well — and I say this with all respect — I would call his artistic style user-unfriendly. His scripts are amazing. I really like The Sisters Dietl (Sestry Dietlovy, 2018). The script is really tight. But the style is very hard to comprehend when you just want to read. If you just want to dash over the painting, then it’s fine. But if you want to really read it, it demands a lot.

 JA: As for your career, you’ve been able to find a style and a way of telling a story that appeals to multiple audiences, whether it’s more alternative or more mainstream.  

 ŠJ: Oh yeah, for sure. But looking back, I honestly think that my biggest influence, when it comes to Czech artists, was this small group of peers we created when I was 15, with Karel Osoha,[v] Viktor Svoboda[vi] and others. We were meeting pretty regularly, like once a week, during that period of life when you can actually do these things intensely. We were looking at each other’s works, seeing how we did things on the page, talking about it. I think that was the biggest influence in the end, even bigger than reading. And today both Karel and Viktor are creating comics.

 JA: Right. So, sorry to return to the historical comics theme. I’m curious whether you think this hyper-attention to historical topics since 2000 has been good for Czech comics, or whether it maybe ended up stifling other trends that might have been more interesting.

 ŠJ: I don’t see it negatively. It might have been nice if we’d maybe had less of it, but that would have been up to the publishers. I understand they want to publish books that are going to sell. And those historical books sell. But it would be nice if there was a bigger push from them to reach out to artists and to offer them more space for their own original work, which is something I’m seeing more of nowadays. But we could use even more, because, in the end, that’s the most interesting thing, right? If you can give space to an artist to create, they might tell the story they have in them that they really want to tell, like the story that was the reason why they started drawing in the first place. So I can see that historical books deserve some space, but maybe less?

Fig 6. The cover to Bald, art by Jislová. 

 JA: So with Bald and this new book, were these things that you had really wanted to do? Was it difficult to convince the publisher to publish these kinds of stories?

 ŠJ: Not difficult, but not easy either. The initiative was taken by the editor in Paseka Press because he asked Tereza if she wanted to turn her experience with the illness into a book. I’ve known Tereza for quite a while, so it was natural for us to work together. On the other hand, we knew that we could fail at this. We felt, as we were working on the book, that this is the first time a publisher is doing something like this in the Czech comics scene. They’re doing autobio. It was a very specific book. They didn’t have experience in this realm. And the same went for us.

 
JA: As you know, in the States, the translation is published by Graphic Mundi, which is known for graphic medicine. So it’s being marketed that way, which makes sense, since it’s about a medical condition.

 ŠJ: You wouldn’t find a publisher like this in the Czech Republic. Working on this book, I realized, “Oh my god, so you can actually make these kind of books here?” So maybe I could do mine, which is something I’d always wanted to do, because I’ve always loved autobiographical comics and wanted to create one of my own. Also, it needs to be said that comics artists don’t have the most adventurous lives. We usually only have one or two stories in us, max. So after we finished Bald, I approached Paseka with the concept for this book. They didn’t like it, which crushed me a bit. The treatment I showed them was for a different book compared to what eventually came together. Because at first I really wanted to do a book about love, mostly about attachment theory. I called it A Small Book About Big Love. But they felt that it wasn’t enough, that the premise was weak. So I reworked it, tried to think about different layers. The book kept getting bigger and bigger, but now they started seeing something they liked in it. Eventually they said yes, and we started working on it.

 JA: So they wanted more of your trauma, more of the difficulties, more of the suffering?

 ŠJ: I think so, yes! But also, I think they couldn’t really conceptualize what the book would look like. They felt that just love as a theme was not enough to carry the whole thing. Even love with problems. And there definitely were problems, but I guess not enough! This might be me projecting, but I felt a little disdain for the “femininity” of the theme. Just a little bit. It was never said out aloud. Books directed at women, like romances, in Czech we call those “red library” (červená knihovna). So I often joke that this book is my “red library.”

 JA: Ha! In some ways, the book reminded me of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), which is also about a very difficult relationship. Except you don’t bring in quite so much psychoanalysis and the main character doesn’t go to a therapist.

 ŠJ: Well, I did go to a therapist in real life, but it’s not in the book. It’s more about the self-development part, like before you go to actual therapy.

Fig 7. The cover to Srdcovka (Heartcore), 

art by Jislová. 

 JA: As for the title, obviously it did not stay A Little Story About Big Love. Why was that? How did you arrive at Srdcovka?

 ŠJ: “Srdcovka” is a word you use for a special hobby, or like a movie from your childhood that you still love. It’s usually used for something that is flawed, but very dear to your heart. Choosing a title was difficult. In the beginning I wanted Megalomaniac. And I wanted to do three books on different themes: one about love, one about sexual violence and one about therapy, which was an insane idea. What was I thinking? The three books would have had titles that looked like they were taken from the Bible, like The Book of Love, The Book of Therapy, etc. But that didn’t work when we decided to do one book with several different themes. And I’m not very good with titles. My approach to creating titles is I just write down the themes of the book and then brainstorm idioms and metaphors. Then I just try to find a good fancy word. The publisher and I worked on it together, but it was mostly me.

 JA: I see. Like I said, I’m primarily interested in how you depicted growing up in the ‘90s/aughts. The question arises about how to do personal history, how much to reveal and how much not, especially when it involves other people. I noticed, for example, that the parents really are not very prominent.

 ŠJ: Yeah, I call them Tom and Jerry parents. Once in a while they’re visible, but they’re not central. You just see their feet, so to speak. This, in fact, was one of the biggest questions I got after the book came out: about the ethics of autobiographies. After a while I figured out that all autobiographies are unethical. That’s just built into the premise. Even if you go around and ask people, “Is this okay? Can I have your consent to include this?”, those people never really know how it’s going to look in the book. Even if they give you consent, the way you might set up the scenes next to each other can give it a different context. So in the end, you never can make it 100% “correct.” But on the other hand, I strongly believe that you have an ultimate right to your own story and how to tell it. So the way I conceptualize it in my head is these processes are parallel. They exist next to each other. And we can try to mitigate the hurt, the collateral damage, but it will always be only a mitigation.

 For example, when I was working on this, I thought I was covering all my bases. And then, after it was published, I realized I forgot to ask my mother-in-law about it.[vii] At one point in the book it switches so it’s told from my husband’s perspective. So in this party scene his parents are there, and he’s not in touch with his father. But I just thought, “I don’t care. He’s not going to know anyway.” But his mom is in it, not in a super bad light, but not in a great light, either. And after it was published, he and I were going to meet them somewhere with some friends or something like that, and I realized, “Oh God, I forgot about this!”

 JA: That sounds a little awkward.

 ŠJ: And he went there alone — because I’m a coward — but it turned out that his mom gave him the hardest time, not me. She said it was his fault “for telling her that I was a bad mom,” so he got all the abuse. And thanks to that, they had a really tough talk that resulted in something good. They talked through a lot of the hardships and resentments that had built up over the years. I don’t want to pat myself on the back for doing something unethical, but in the end, it actually helped their relationship.

 People are very resilient. There are some pretty tough themes in this book, the sexual violence for one, and I thought it was going to really ruffle feathers with some people. But a lot of them are very happy being ignorant. Some people that I talk about in Srdcovka, I felt, “Okay, this will break their silence.” And one of them did reach out to me about it. But the rest, well, they know about the book. I don’t know if they read it, but they know about it. And none of them has contacted me or sent a message or anything. So a lot of people are very adamant about living in their bubble and not letting in anything that could change their perspective about certain things.

 JA: Something else: I do wonder if this book, once it’s translated into English, whether it might be read as an allegory of the Czech Republic and Russia or something like that. Like being colonized by the Habsburgs! You know, the idea of trying to get independence, but also feeling that you’re tied together. An allegory of Czech history, I don’t know. I’m just saying sometimes people read stuff into it because it’s Czech, because it’s Eastern Europe, even though I know Czechs prefer “Central Europe.”

 ŠJ: Yeah, but there’s nobody else in Central Europe. So the term is a bit redundant.

 JA: Something like that happened to Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Because it came out late in the Cold War, many in the West read it as an allegory about the GULAG system, or about Stalin, and so on. And, I mean, sure, you could sort of see it that way, but Tarkovsky was always very angry about stuff like that, because he was interested in larger themes. But because of the geopolitics of the time, Western audiences tended to squeeze art into these other boxes. So did Soviet audiences, for that matter.  

 ŠJ: I don’t think that’ll happen with my book. It’s a very different time. I imagine that for most English-language readers, it will be their first encounter with Czech comics. And like you said, autobio comics are already a pretty familiar genre globally.

 JA: Yeah. Czechia is lucky that it’s not in crisis. The situation is very different right now for Ukrainian cartoonists, for example. Anything they produce is read, one way or the other, as a commentary on the war. You can make a romance comic, but it’s still somehow about the war. That cuts both ways, of course. Ukrainian cartoonists are getting a lot more attention now internationally, but at the same time, they’re often seen as victims, or refugees, but especially as spokespeople who have to have something to say about the war. And they have to say the right things about the war. Imagine if a Ukrainian cartoonist made a comic saying, “Well, you know, maybe we should just give up territory to Russia.” Not that I advocate that for one second! I’m just saying the circumstances of national crisis are always going to affect what kind of art one makes.

 ŠJ: Yeah, Srdcovka, I think, might spark controversies on a different scale. For example, when I develop a character, I’m usually using a familiar template. I did that for the male protagonist — but my idea, or my hope, is that the reader will realize that just because someone is telling you the story doesn’t mean they’re the hero or they’re right. Because when we’re reading autobiographies, we always, and I think it’s kind of natural, we presume that this person is right, or we’re supposed to sympathize with them. But it really skews our perspective on the other characters. When you read the part where the perspective changes, you might start to see the male protagonist as an antagonist, which is not the case. It just is what it is. This is just a perspective issue.

 JA: That’s a big leap for a lot of people, though, right? Especially if we’re talking about someone who has hurt you. It can be hard to just say, “Oh, well, you know, he had a bad upbringing or whatever, and after all it’s just a matter of perspective.” That can be too much for some people. That’s what I think you do best, actually: how you capture that feeling of an ongoing quasi-abusive relationship, almost like a kind of horror story.

 ŠJ: It can be that: a horror story! That’s the thing. When you’re caught in the middle of it, it can feel like a drug. Because it really is your body giving you happy hormones when you get into that type of situation.

Fig 8. Cover to Milada Horaková, art by Jislová.

 JA: You reminded me of another question I had, because I’m interested in episodes of historical trauma. Now, a lot of the books that we’ve talked about, whether it’s Zátopek or even your book on Milada Horáková,[viii] they tend to be more hagiographic. In the case of Zátopek, they won’t talk much about unsavory things like his collaboration with the Communists, which is still taboo in Czech culture for a lot of people. These books tend to be more patriotic. Obviously that’s going to sell better because it’s more positive. But what about a subject like, for example, 1968, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia? I know that recently there’s been a bit more work on that in comics regionally,[ix] but you still don’t see much about it in Czech comics compared to other periods, like the Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, the Communist era. Me, I’ve always been taken with the story of Jan Palach.[x] You’re working on a graphic biography of Václav Havel.[xi] But why do you think in all these years there hasn’t been a graphic biography of Palach?

 ŠJ: You’re right, I don’t think there’s anything about him in comics. Or very little. It’s complicated, because even the comics on historical subjects that do exist don’t always do justice to their subjects. That has less to do with the comics than with the way we tend to look at historical figures. Because Milada Horaková, for instance, lived a really interesting life. It’s kind of sad that we focus only on her being murdered. But she was a politician. She was doing a lot of stuff even before the Republic was established. During the Second World War, she was in the resistance. But with Palach, he died so young. He really just has that one story: killing himself in protest. Or at least that one act overshadows everything else. If you were going to do comics about him, I guess you’d have to come up with stories to fill in the gap between him being born and his dying, stories that didn’t happen in real life?

 JA: Some people I’ve talked to about this say that maybe there’s no interest in making comics about Palach because everybody already knows his story, and it’s kind of clichéd. The tragic martyr. What do you think about that? I mean, you probably grew up with this story.

Fig 9. Film Poster for Havel.

 ŠJ: Yeah. In general, the historical comics market is a bit saturated, so that’s maybe why they’re not beating down the door to do this. And then, like you said, it’s the more patriotic, happy stories that get made more. Readers tend to like uncomplicated heroes! Though maybe that’s changing a bit, or our approach is changing. Like this book about Havel I’m doing, it’s less patriotic. Because Havel was a very flawed human being. A lot of what we’re doing with it is trying to find a middle ground. There was a Czech film about Havel three or four years ago.[xii] Deconstruction was the name of the game for this movie! And he comes off as this huge asshole. If I’d just seen that movie and didn’t know anything else about him, I would call him the worst person ever, because he cheats on his wife, he’s proposing weird polycule harem stuff to his lovers, he drinks too much, smokes too much. He just comes off really bad. And I didn’t want to do that in our book because, sure, he had his vices, but he also obviously did a lot of good as a dissident and later as president. Maybe we shouldn’t forget that!

 I think in these graphic biographies you need to cover both sides of the person, weave the two sides together. I do see a bit of a shift in approach to how we tell these historical stories. I’m drawing this Havel biography and I’m also writing another history-themed book, also on commission. It’s about Ruth Maier.[xiii] She had a fate similar to Anne Frank’s, but she was older, so her writings are a bit more mature, and her story deals more with finding your place in the world. And while we include her being Jewish and being a victim of historical events, it’s not the central focus throughout. It’s more a coming-of-age story than history. For me, that’s important, to try to keep a sense of the complexity of these real people. So when we do these stories we can focus on something different than just educating the reader about dates and events. Make it more about how people live through these difficult periods of time. That’s something that interests me more as an artist, and I hope readers too.

Fig 10. Film Poster for Jan Palach.

 JA: What you’re saying reminds me of that movie about Palach, which also came out a few years ago.[xiv] I thought it was pretty good, but also really dreary. You got the sense, the whole time, that the filmmakers know that you know how this all going to end. It got into his mental illness, too. I guess the story of Palach is just very, very sad. There’s no way around that. It’s a tragic, depressing story, especially because, if you read his suicide letter, you can see he really felt committed to his cause. Or, yes, maybe he was just deluded. He really thought that by setting himself on fire, it would lead to people rising up, or real changes being made in the government. Of course that was never going to happen.

 ŠJ: Yeah, it was a very authentic and honest act.

 JA: But not really in touch with reality. I think today we would just say he was deeply depressed. He was going through clinical depression.

 ŠJ: Yeah, I think so. That’s the way we see him now. Also, I’d say the reason there’s very few comics about the ‘68 events is that there’s not enough of a story. You can approach it from various angles, you can zoom in, zoom out, but it all ends in tragedy. That’s not true about World War II or the Communist period, which both ended in wins for the people, so to speak. Even with Milada Horaková, while her story didn’t have a happy ending, today we tend to see her as an icon of righteousness, authenticity and honesty. So she eventually did have a happy ending, sort of. But with Palach, there’s nothing. He was just a sick person who killed himself. Sure he was protesting, but the Warsaw Pact armies had still invaded, ‘68 still happened, socialism with a human face was dead, etc. And even if decades later it finally got better, it took so long. I guess it’ just too hard to reframe Palach’s story into something positive.

 JA: Yeah, I guess you’d have to go really baroque and experimental with the history, like Mašek and Baban in the Damian Chobot trilogy.[xv] Or maybe some of what Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell do in From Hell (1999). That’s an example of going in a very experimental direction.

 ŠJ: I never finished that book. I was like, “Well, who are these people? I give up.”

 JA: Yeah. No, I can understand that.

 

José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published academic books on Russian/Eastern European comics and other topics.

---

[i] Zátopek (2016), written by Jan Novák, with art by Jaromír 99. Based on the life of Emil Zátopek, a celebrated Czech Olympic runner who won three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Summer Olympics.

[ii] For another work reflecting this trend, see Jiří Franta’s graphic novel Singl (2019; translated as Single, 2023).

 [iii] In 2000, Tomáš Kučerovský along with Tomáš Prokůpek co-founded the seminal Czech comics journal Aargh! In 2006 he participated in a comics workshop in Singapore, which led to Aargh!: Singapurský Speciál (Aargh!: A Singapore Special, 2008), an international collaboration with several artists. See an interview with Kučerovský in The International Journal of Comic Art. Vol. 14, No.1 (Spring 2012): 419-431.

[iv] Lomová began publishing the adventures of the mice characters Anča and Pepík in 1989. They have appeared as stand-alone graphic novels, as collections and in children’s journals like Čtyřlístek (Four-Leaf Clover).

[v] Karel Osoha stands out among younger Czech comics artist for his prolific output and diversity of works, including his adaptation of Vojtěch Matocha’s scifi novel Dustzone (Prašina, 2018) and his contribution to the collaborative historical comics project Forced Labor (Totální nasazení, 2017).

[vi] Better known as an illustrator, animator and storyboard artist, in 2023 Viktor Svoboda started drawing the series Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdinové na dluh), written by Jislová.   

[vii] Jislová clarified in a follow-up e-mail that here she was referring to the mother of Michal, the male protagonist in Heartcore. Though the book ends with their relationship inconclusive, Jislová explained that today they are married. She further clarified: “I try not to put too much emphasis on the fact they we did end up together, as I worry it gives a wrong idea that if you try hard enough, you can change an avoidant partner. And that’s not the moral I wish the readers would take from the story.”

[viii] Milada Horaková (1’901-1950) was a Czech politician and an active figure in the Czech resistance during the Nazi occupation of WWII. After the communists took over the country in 1948, she was executed on false charges, and rehabilitated in 1968. 

[ix] See, for example, Bulgarian author Veselin Pramatarov’s graphic biography On Strings 1968: A True Story (Na Konci. 1968. Po dejstvitelen slučaj, 2021), about three Bulgarian students in Prague during the Warsaw Pact invasion. Translated into Czech as Na nitkách. 1968. Podle skutečné události (2024) and published by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, a Czech government agency and research center. 

[x] Jan Palach (1948-1969) was a student at Charles University in Prague who set himself ablaze to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had brought the liberal reforms of the Prague Spring to a close. He died of his injuries.   

[xi] Havel: Playing With the Devil (Havel: Hrátky s čertem, forthcoming 2025), in collaboration with writer (and biographer/personal friend of Havel) Michael Žantovský.

[xii] Havel (directed by Slávek Horák, 2020).

[xiii] Ruth Maier (1920-1942) was an Austrian Jew killed during the Holocaust. Her diary, describing her experiences in Austria and Norway as the disaster unfolded, was published in 2007. 

[xiv] Jan Palach (directed by Robert Sedláček, 2018).

[xv] Džian Baban and Vojtěch Mašek’s graphic novel series Fred Brunold’s Monstercabaret Presents (Monstrkabaret Freda Brunolda uvádí, 2004-2008), also known as the Damian Chobot trilogy, among other things presents traumatic episodes in post-WWII Czech history through an avant garde lens.