‘My
Red Library’: A Štěpánka Jislová Interview
José
Alaniz
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| 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?
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Fig 1. Cover to Zátopek,
art by Jaromír 99.
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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?
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Fig 2. Cover to Lucie Lomová’s
Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary.
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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?
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Fig 5. The cover to Vojtěch
Mašek’s The Sisters Dietl.
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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?
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| 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.
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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.
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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.
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