The Ninth Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou: A Review of Comics 1964-2024

  

The Ninth Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou:

A Review of Comics 1964-2024

 Mark David Nevins

  

Fig. 1

 

One could say that comics and art museums have had an uneasy relationship--but the reality is, they’ve mostly had no relationship at all.

One of the first large-scale attempts to bring comic art into museums in a serious way was MoMA’s 1990 show “High/Low:  Modern Art and Popular Culture.” This ballyhooed exhibition aimed to show how pop culture shapes “high” art, juxtaposing fine artists, such as Picasso, Warhol, and Lichtenstein, with comic strips and newspaper ads--some of which had served as sources or “swipes” for those artists’ work. From scholars to fans, reception was scathing. Roberta Smith famously sneered in The New York Times that it was “at best, the wrong exhibition in the wrong place at the wrong time.”¹

Me? I didn’t really care. I was 25, completely unconcerned about esoteric intellectual debates, and awestruck to be able to spend hours looking at “Krazy Kat” original pages.

A less intellectually encumbered celebration of comic art came 15 years later with “Masters of American Comics,” which was shown across two venues in Los Angeles:  the Hammer Museum and MOCA. This 2005 show highlighted 15 comics “masters”--from Winsor McCay and George Herriman to Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware--with each essentially given his own mini-retrospective. A sprawling “greatest hits” of American comic art, the show was praised for its attempt to legitimize comic art as museum-worthy while faulted for presenting a canon that was, without exception, white and male. (Even early in the 21^st Century, Herriman was still “passing,” posthumously.)

Unlike “High/Low,” the “Masters” show presented some problems for me--40 years old and in possession of a Ph.D. in Literature--due to its lack of any curatorial framework or “idea” behind the exhibit:  no examination of commercial or cultural contexts; no argument for the development of an art form; no attention to the various marginalizations that had shaped the medium of comics. That said, I left my pretensions at the door to bask in the glow of hundreds of pages of original art--and left with some insights that still inform my passions and opinions to this day:  Frank King and Milton Caniff are absolute geniuses; Lyonel Feininger is criminally underrated, while Will Eisner is a bit overrated (sorry); and Winsor McCay’s work really must be seen in color to be fully appreciated--the black-and-white original art mostly sits on the wall and disappears.

This past year, nearly two decades later, France raised the stakes with a compendious and ambitious exhibition at the Centre Pompidou titled “Comics 1964-2024,” curated by Anne Lemonnier, Emmanuèle Payen, Thierry Groensteen, and Lucas Hureau.² Billed as a celebration of 60 years of le neuvième art (“the ninth art,” a term adopted in the 1960s by Francophone critics seeking to legitimize comics), the show gathered hundreds of works from around the globe and across a remarkable range of styles, formats, and movements. This was not the Pompidou’s first foray into comics:  previous exhibitions included shows in the 1970s and 1980s on comics and everyday life and comics from the 1950s, as well as a blockbuster Hergé show in 2006. But “Comics 1964-2024” has been by far the most ambitious European effort to present comics holistically as a mature art form.

Thanks to some serendipitous business travel, I was lucky enough to have a free day in Paris on literally the last day of the Pompidou show, thus giving me a trifecta of the most important museum shows about comics in my lifetime … so far.³ I stayed inside the museum for the entirety of its opening hours on Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024, exhausting the friends who had joined me--and I could easily have spent three or four more days at the show without getting bored. Indeed, surrounded by more than 1,000 comic pages, covers, illustrations, sketchbooks, printed books, and other ephemera, I’d have happily been locked into the museum for a week!

After passing through a “portal”--an homage to the 20^th-Century master Jean-Claude Forest by beloved and prolific 21^st-Century cartoonist Blutch--the visitor entered an initial room that presented a powerful argument:  the global upheavals of the 1960s--cultural, social, political, and artistic--had catalyzed a new kind of comic art.

 

Fig. 2

 

Or, perhaps put more daringly:  catalyzed by those events, comics as a form had become something completely different from its historical roles as children’s entertainment or an occasional diversion for adults in daily newspapers.

As linguists and anthropologists talk about polygenesis, there was something going on in the zeitgeist or collective unconscious during this decade that sprouted distinct but essentially related sequential narrative traditions. In France, a touchstone was the rise of Hara-Kiri, a self-proclaimed “stupid and nasty” magazine featuring bandes dessinées mocking bourgeois politics and aesthetics. In Japan, Garo magazine presented a showcase for introspective, radical manga for adult readers. And in the United States, the Underground Comix movement exploded with Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Trina Robbins, and other over-the-counter pioneers who irreverently satirized mainstream American culture and mores.

That opening salvo for “Comics 1964-2024” was strong:  the claim that these simultaneous cultural eruptions laid the foundation for what was to come in sequential art over the next half-century. Just a few decades later, the world would witness the almost unimaginable flowering and maturation of the graphic novel, the literary comic, and the hybrid artistic experiments that represent comics as a medium and an art form in the 21^st Century. From origins at the margins of proper society--countercultural ’zines, head shops, underground presses--comics have evolved into a medium now worthy of being presented in one of the most admired museums in the world.

For better or worse, that opening argument dissipated as one got deeper into the show. As the exhibit unfolded, the programming shifted to a loosely structured sequence of theme-based rooms, seemingly committed to displaying a “greatest hits” of stunning comic art rather than exploring any cohesive story about the medium’s development. For visitors newer to comics, the sheer variety must have been thrilling--if perhaps overwhelming--but for those with more knowledge of comics’ history, its major works and key creators, the lack of historical or conceptual throughline was frustrating. Or that was certainly my own feeling, as well as the report I heard from more than a few knowledgeable friends lucky enough to see the show.

With “Contre-culture” (Counterculture) as the first room, the themes of the following rooms ranged from “Fiction du future” (Future Fiction or science fiction) and “Rêve” (Dreams) to “Villes” (Cities) and “Géométrie” (Geometry). This selection of themes felt arbitrary--if not uninteresting. While the whole exhibition gave the attentive viewer both visual delight and historical range, it came at the expense of clear intentionality and without much curatorial apparatus.

The early countercultural material was rich with context and layered juxtaposition. Seeing French underground comics alongside American and Japanese works from the same era revealed not just parallel energies but fundamentally different--and even orthogonal--artistic responses to the global cultural moment. Where American underground comix leaned into psychedelia, drugs, and sexual liberation, French artists channeled their energy into political dissent and aesthetic innovation, as in the case of Forest’s Barbarella or Peellaert’s Jodelle. Japan’s Garo offered yet another track:  class struggle, existential introspection, and artistic minimalism, perhaps taking cues from contemporary national writers and filmmakers, such as Kenzaburō Ōe and Nagisa Oshima. This juxtaposition was brilliantly instructive--as the wall text explained:

 

The 1960s saw the development of forms of free expression and protest all over the world, going against the values and hierarchies of establishment culture. This counterculture was the identity marker of a generation and especially permeated the field of comics, which until then were considered as being for children by their very nature.

 

Fig. 3

 

In France, Japan, and then the United States, new forms of comics appeared on the fringes of mainstream production. They expanded comic readership and sowed the seeds for themes that would take on considerable significance around the turn of the century, defining the contours of modern comics:  graphic journalism, confessional style, addressing major societal issues, and mixing comics with other forms of art. The 1960s also marked the start of the process of cultural legitimisation that would lead to the recognition of “the ninth art.”

 

But, as the exhibition unfolded, its themes became more diffuse. “Rire,” the room dedicated to humor, gathered pages by Claire Bretécher, André Franquin, Bill Watterson, and Albert Uderzo, among others--but presented them with no logic or framing. Which caused the viewer (or me, at least) to start a little mental game:  “Which creators should or could have been included in this room, and why were they omitted?” As I proceeded through the rest of the exhibition, that game took up more and more of my mental attention. In the section on “black and white,” for example, to illustrate how comics intersect with film and roman noir, I’d have preferred less Frank Miller (who has always struck me as overly derivative of his forebears) and more Jose Muñoz (Fig. 4), Baru, Didier Comes, Alex Toth, or even Darwyn Cooke’s masterful interpretations of Richard Stark’s brilliant series of hardboiled novels about a thief named Parker.

 

Fig. 4

 

To continue, while hopefully not complaining overmuch, the 1980s “realistic” branch of Franco-Belgian comics, not so fashionable these days, was completely overlooked (no Jean Giraud, no François Boucq, no Hermann), as was much of the kids’ section (no Peyo, no Quino). While that first room had implicitly set the show’s parameters as Western Europe, Japan, and North America, the utter omission of comics from Africa (with strong traditions in South Africa, West Africa, Nigeria, and Algeria); China, Korea, or the rest of Asia outside Japan; or South America (aside from the few creators published in Europe like Muñoz and Alberto Breccia) was puzzling. The United Kingdom also got short shrift. The omission of inarguable giants and massive influencers like Jaime and Beto Hernandez (USA), Max (Spain), Joost Swarte (Netherlands), and Dylan Horrocks (New Zealand) was mystifying. And there not even a glimpse of the Italian Milo Manara, one of the biggest names in latter-day European comics--though perhaps for an all-ages show a 13^th room on Erotica was understandably vetoed.⁴

While the European curators made efforts to include plenty of North American cartoonists, their perception of 21^st-Century work from the new world felt dated. Creators, such as Eleanor Davis, Sammy Harkham, Dash Shaw, or Jillian Tamaki, could have settled nicely into more than one of the thematic rooms and offered a more contemporary look at how comics creators across the Atlantic are engaging with the form. What’s been happening in English-language comics in the latest generation is as exciting as anything coming from the continent, but you wouldn’t know it from this show.

One side note on the exhibition’s physical space:  clearly the desire to show as much original comic art as possible was paramount. But each room--even the makeshift ones set off by curtains--felt cramped and claustrophobic, especially with the masses of enthusiastic crowds. Artwork was hung tightly arranged, with little breathing room for the material or the viewers. The original works were mostly presented simply--often without frames at all--but the density, along with the lack of commentary, again made it difficult to discern patterns or threads, never mind arguments. One could happily lose hours in any room, nose inches from stunning originals--seeing the actual ink on paper in the hand of the artist is transporting--but the exercise felt more like rummaging through some lucky collector’s trove than engaging in a museum show.

A section on horror or fear, “Effroi,” followed suit. With work from the EC Comics of the 1950s (which, it should be noted fall well outside of the show’s stated timeframe!), Japanese masters Junji Ito and Hideshi Hino (Fig. 5), and Charles Burns, it was packed with macabre brilliance but, again, no curatorial logic. Horror is not a monolithic genre--it spans the grotesque, the psychological, the physiological, the absurd, and more--and without guidance, the viewer was left to make sense of jumps from, say, Swamp Thing to Daniel Clowes without much sense of relation. That said, highlights abounded, including 110 pages from Hino’s Hell Baby, which held my attention for a good half hour. Oddly, the curators offered a full wall of the spellbinding work of the German master, Anke Feuchtenberger, in this section, where it felt out of place. Perhaps “Dreams” would have been more suitable.

 

Fig. 5

 

To be fair, every section of the exhibit pleased, once the viewer gave up looking for a curatorial argument and simply enjoyed the work. “Rêve,” the room on dreams, included some of the most imaginative work on display--from Fred’s surreal Philémon strips to Julie Doucet’s dream diaries to David B.’s Les Incidents de la nuit (Nocturnal Conspiracies).

In this area, an oneiric anthology, comics’ unique power to blur inner and outer worlds was on full display. A towering installation, perhaps ten feet tall, of the first 32 pages of “Les Cauchemars de l’amateur” (Fig. 6), a never-published nightmare comics story by Killoffer, was one the highlights of this section, and indeed the entire show. (How is it possible that this work has never been collected into a book?!)

 

Fig. 6

Another triumph was the room dedicated to “Couleur,” which traced how artists from Moebius to Brecht Evens use color not just decoratively but narratively and emotionally. Seeing original pages from the illustrator/cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti (Fig. 7), Nicole Claveloux’s The Green Hand, and Moebius’s ground-breaking Arzach (Fig. 8) in their unmediated, physical form offered a rare treat: mechanical printing simply cannot capture the nuance of these richly painted colors.

 

   

     Fig. 7                                                             Fig. 8

 

Autobiography (Récits personnels) was a particularly strong section. Works by David B., Alison Bechdel, Fabrice Neaud, and Dominique Goblet, illustrated how comics can be a powerful medium for emotional intimacy, psychological inquiry, and self-reinvention. The juxtaposition of Bechdel’s Fun Home and Neaud’s diary comics underscored how different cultural contexts may shape confessional storytelling--even in what some viewers might (falsely) assume would be a leveling category such as queer comics. But again, the lack of a curatorial thesis led to puzzling omissions and lost teaching moments. It’s no surprise, of course, that this section was so strong, since autobiography has in many ways been the foundational mode for comics’ self-reinvention since the 1990s. As such, autobiography isn’t just a one category among others--it is, arguably, one of the central evolutions of comics in the last 30 years, and that argument could and should have been made.

The section, “Histoire et mémoire,” powerfully elucidated comics’ relationship with history and memory. Pages from Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), Emmanuel Guibert’s La guerre d’Alain (Alan’s War, Fig. 9) and Jacques Tardi’s World War I narratives (Fig. 10) traced how cartoonists have tackled historical trauma with depth, immediacy, and moral urgency. These works stand not only as documentation, but as emotional interpretation--and they remind us how comics, through juxtaposition and layering, are uniquely suited to convey the fragmented nature of recollection. However, since war comics have been such a dominant genre over the last half-century, including in the mainstream, a savvy viewer was likely awkwardly reminded of how much was left out.

 

        

                                    Fig. 9                                                                Fig. 10

 

To my dismay as an English Ph.D., the “Littérature” room felt the least essential. It presented capable adaptations of works by Poe, de Maupassant, Flaubert, and Steinbeck--alongside satirical appropriations, such as Winshluss’s Pinocchio and Posy Simmonds’s Gemma Bovery--but didn’t offer much insight or commentary into anything novel such adaptations might produce. Hunt Emerson’s sly and sometimes scandalous retellings of classics, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, would have been much more illuminating, not to mention David Hughes’s magnificent Othello. (Both artists are British.) While there’s nothing wrong with showing comics’ engagement with literature, the underlying message here seemed to be one of validation:  “Look, comics can do literature too!” Yet the deeper truth--that comics can do many things that traditional words-only prose cannot--was left unexplored. The section missed an opportunity to explain the medium’s distinctive capabilities:  its ability to collapse time, blend narration and image, and structure perception spatially as well as temporally.

By the final few rooms--which focused on geometry, cities, and formal experimentation--the show began to feel more like a sprawling cabinet of magnificent curiosities than a presentation of ideas organizing the displays. I suspect most viewers, whether comics experts or casual visitors, were running out of gas by this point--yet perhaps they might not have been, had there been a clearer explanatory thread or conceptual map running through the exhibit. Indeed, the back end of the show featured some of the most visually inventive objects on display--including pages by Chris Ware, Jochen Gerner, Yuichi Yokoyama, and Marc-Antoine Mathieu--which dazzle in their conceptual complexity. Seth’s surprisingly large and meticulous model of his imagined city of Dominion (Fig. 11) was stunning, but must have been lost on some visitors who had by now reached complete cognitive saturation.

 

Fig. 11

For all its bounteous riches, I admit that “Comics 1964-2024” nevertheless left me with the feeling of a missed opportunity. The show began with a sharp idea: that comics around the world had collectively responded in a unique and unexpected way to the shocks and possibilities of the 1960s and have since matured into a complex, global, and increasingly popular set of languages and media--no longer an overlooked little sibling to more serious modes of high art. That idea could have carried through the exhibition, but, instead, the show followed a more traditional retrospective model:  gather as much great work as possible and organize it loosely by theme. The result was often stunning--but rarely instructive.

However, being more generous, perhaps the exhibition’s biggest flaw--its lack of sustained argument--was also, for some viewers, its strength. Over glasses of wine after the show, one of my companions said to me, “I don’t know a lot about comics, but moving from room to room what was most amazing to me was how very different all of the work of the different creators is and what a vast universe of ideas and styles and subject comics can embrace.” No, the show did not lay out a coherent history or thesis, but it certainly conveyed comics’ astounding depth and breadth. And it did so with affection, admiration, and an earnest desire to elevate the medium.

So, a positive and optimistic conclusion. It was absolutely thrilling to see almost the entirety of a major art museum, like the Pompidou, turned over to comic art for the better part of a year, and “Comics 1964-2024” is truly unprecedented in its scope, depth, and sheer celebration. As comics continue to gain cultural legitimacy, we can hope that exhibitions like “Comics 1964-2024” may become more common. The Pompidou show may not have achieved the full integration of narrative and form, of ideas and images, that the best comics themselves offer--but it did bring graphic narrative into the halls of one of the world’s great museums, with no need of a Trojan Horse like “High/Low,” and put its diversity on display for a wide public. That alone is an achievement. The Ninth Art, like the curators who care for it, is still evolving. May the next major comics exhibition be even more beautiful--and a bit braver in its storytelling.

 

 

Endnotes

 

¹ “High and Low Culture Meet on a One-Way Street.” The New York Times. Oct. 5, 1990.

² It should be noted that “Comics 1964-2024” was just one part of a broader program at the Pompidou, “La BD à tous les étages” (Comics on Every Floor), which ran from May 29 to Nov. 4 of 2024. In addition to a series of lectures and performances, ancillary exhibitions included Corto Maltese:  Une vie romanesque, focused on Hugo Pratt’s iconic sailor; “Tenir tête,” an immersive installation for children designed by the remarkable Marion Fayolle; a showcase of the avant-garde comics from the magazine Lagon; and “La bande dessinée au Musée” or “Comics at the Museum.” I was able to spend some time at this last show as well, which paired contemporary comics artwork with masterpieces of modern art. While I liked the concept, the promised “dialogues” didn’t really impress.

³ For those less lucky, a sumptuous catalogue was produced for “Comics 1964-2024.” Like the catalogues for the two earlier American shows, it deserves to be in the library of any committed comics aficionado.

⁴ On the other hand, another great Italian comics artist known for his erotica, Guido Crepax, was included. And rightfully so:  once you get past the kink, Crepax is one of the most innovative and influential masters of page composition in all of comics history.

________________________

Mark David Nevins is a professor at Holy Cross College and heads a consulting group.

Book Review: Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre

 Reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Collège de Maisonneuve

James J. Donahue. Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: Studies in Genre. Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2024. 198 pp. US $25.00 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-4968-5050-8. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/I/Indigenous-Comics-and-Graphic-Novels

  

There has been, especially in the last decade, an important growth in the number of Indigenous works in graphic storytelling. James J. Donahue’s book is a significative academic work on Indigenous storytelling in the comics medium.

The book is of interest to both Indigenous readers who will learn about stories from artists from a variety of nations and non-Indigenous readers opening up to a decolonial perspective. The book offers politically-charged readings of works by many Indigenous leading artists who have worked in the medium of comics:  Lee Francis IV, Gord Hill, Weyoshot Alvitre, Michael Yahgulanaas, eelonqa K. harris, David A. Robertson, Katherena Vermette, Kyle Charles, Cole Pauls, and the late Jeffrey Veregge, who passed away in 2024.

Donahue delves into a variety of books and covers different genres:  Indigenous futurism, biofictional and historical narratives, experimental works, and the genre native to the comics medium, superhero stories. There are moments in his book where the fan meets the academic. For instance, when he discusses the self-published first issue of S9: Sequoyah 9 (2019) by Richard Crowsong, Derrick B. Lee, and Tristen Oakenthorn, he quips:  “I am sure I am not alone in hoping this series can continue, given its exciting intervention into the science fiction genre” (p. 73).

Donahue’s work aligns with Mark C. Jerng’s criticism of race in Racial-Worldmaking:  The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) and with Gerald Vizenor’s now classic book, Indigenous Survivance (2009). Donahue situates Indigenous and African futurisms as counterpoints to much of classic science fiction where the fictional worlds that were imagined were often post-racial. In Donahue’s reading, “the graphic novelists producing science fiction narratives all confront--to varying degrees--the machinery of settler colonialism while rejecting the narrative that would suggest that Indigenous peoples are not part of our technologically advanced future” (p. 59). As a basis to his take on Indigenous futurism, Donahue offers readings of five short stories from the Moonshot anthologies (2008-2015), the self-published comic S9:  Sequoyah 9 (2019), and Cole Pauls’ Dakwäkãda Warriors (2019). Indigenous survivance is a main thread. Cole Pauls makes survivance explicit as the characters in the book speak a mix of English and Southern Tutchone. Survivance also implies a different relation to the environment as these technologically advanced Indigenous peoples are shown to have developed a lifestyle respectful of the natural world. Donahue also stops at stories in which the presence of ancestors is said to be felt and discusses non-linear time.

The biofictional and historical narratives looked into by Donahue all work to connect the present to the past. Four bodies of work are taken into account here:  Katherena Vermette and Scott B. Henderson’s Echo; David A. Robertson’s Tales from Big Spirit series of biofictions with various artists; Lee Francis IV and Weyoshot Alvitre’s Ghost River:  The Fall & Rise of the Conestoga, and Chag Lowry’s Soldiers Unknown. In many of Robertson’s stories, as is the case in Vermette’s Echo, characters from the present day enter into contact with long deceased characters, either by appearing in that past or the character seemingly appearing to them in their environment or, more classically, in dream state. At times, a marker of the past is found in the present and links the two characters. Each of the Tales from Big Spirit book is a short 28-page story in which a youth learns about the past. Echo, originally published in four volumes and later in a trade paperback edition, offered the author more possibilities in the representation of continuities between past and present. In Vermette’s story, Echo, the main character (not to be confounded with Marvel Comics’ character of the same name), travels at different times in the past 250 years. She witnesses major events of Métis history, and all the characters that she interacts with are her ancestors, some of which she meets at different ages of their lives. The connection between past and present here also resonates for the characters from the past as they learn through Echo’s visits that the Métis nation will survive. Ghost River and Soldiers Unknown also connect different times through a recurring motive, that of a wampum belt in the former and a design found on a regalia in the latter. In Ghost River for instance, the wampum belt is presented early on in a two-page spread as it is being woven. It appears again in the story, ripped, with images of the massacre against the Conestoga. At the end, as the story is being told to a contemporary audience, the belt is mended.

Of great interest is Donahue’s criticism of there being only certain permissible narratives if an Indigenous author wants to be published. He borrows this notion from Christopher Gonzalez, who made the argument about the expectations of publishers and, to a certain extent, the public, about being Latinx. For decades, stories were expected to follow the road opened by N. Scott Momaday and other writers of the 1970s who are often referred to as the Native American Renaissance. If “permissible” books were all to be like this, they would all feature spiritual traditions and political reclamation. Donahue offers an in-depth look at two more experimental artists. In the case of Michael Yahgulanaas, he delves into similarities in the artist’s installation work and in his graphic narratives which Yahgulanaas refers to as “Haida manga.” In both, the artist calls upon the spectator or reader to interact with the materiality of the artwork or the book. Yahgulanaas’ Haida manga are also interesting in their design as the panels are neither the traditional rectangles of western comics and manga, nor the more irregular panels that artists have played with but are defined by a formline mural. Yahgulanaas’ design process for a story moves between this mural and cutouts from it, each one a page. The formlines can roughly be understood as the equivalent of the gutter. However, rather than being an empty space, they are sturdy material with which the characters in the panels can interact. In a very different manner, eelonqa K. harris employs a kind of formal experimentation meant to emphasize the art of a Sto:lo community. The panels in her graphic novels are photographs of scenes with small avatars of actual people created in 3-D printing and dressed in miniature clothes.

 

In addition to the 3D-printed avatars representing actual Indigenous individuals, harris also includes photographs of the artwork created by one of those individuals (whom she credits in a textbox on the bottom of the page), highlighting the artistic creations of her community members. In doing so, harris subtly suggests that these various community members are people with various skills and talents that also deserve recognition, another means of artistic cocreation (p. 140).

 

A chapter is devoted to superhero comics. If some superheroes more or less fall within the expectations of the genre, Super Indian and Kagagi, both created in 2011, or Captain Paiute, created in 2015, others transgress permissible narratives. Donahue devotes one of his readings to Stephen Jones’ My Hero (2017), a metafictional superhero story about a kid who can’t draw creating his own superhero. The youth is trying to come up with a full story of Staranger, a superhero of extraterrestrial origin. With the character only in outline, designed for transference, any reader can imagine oneself as this hero. Jones’ book serves as a good example that “no one racial population owns the right to create a superhero from outer space” (p. 48).

In the conclusion to his book, Donahue discusses other possible approaches to Indigenous comics, for instance, an in-depth look at publishers—Indigenous-owned or -managed versus large settler publishers. Another possibility that he doesn’t account for would be to read the works by taking into account the genres in which a specific nation classified their stories and recently published comics and graphic novels.

 

“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/.

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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.