‘My Red Library’: A Štěpánka Jislová Interview

‘My Red Library’: A Štěpánka Jislová Interview

José Alaniz

  

Self-portrait from her website.

 

Štěpánka Jislová (b. 1992) graduated from the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň. She has published in several Czech and international comics collections. She also contributed to the monumental history comics series The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016) and illustrated the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020), written by Zdeněk Ležák. Her other credits include writing the superhero satire Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdinové na dluh, 2023) with art by Viktor Svoboda. She won the Muriel Award (the Czech comics industry’s highest prize), for her art on the graphic memoir Bald (Bez Vlasů, 2021; English translation 2024), a collaboration with writer Tereza Čechová. Two years later she released Heartcore (Srdcovka, 2023; English translation 2025), widely regarded as the first full-length single-author Czech comics memoir. It won that year’s Muriel for best comics work. This interview was conducted in Prague on June 20, 2024. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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

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

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

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

Fig 2. Cover to Lucie Lomová’s Every 

Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary. 

 

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

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

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

 JA: And Alison Bechdel?

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

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

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

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

 JA: Yeah. It’s more like a map.

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

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

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

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

 ŠJ: I’m not sure nostalgia is the term. I really looked at it more as, maybe, an autopsy? Yeah. So I really wanted to make a book where you can see the actions and reactions, how one thing can grow into another and then, by the end of the book, the reader can see how far things can go.  That’s why there’s an educational part to it as well. I got a few notes from different people, saying that when they got to the educational part, they it felt suddenly turned a bit too cold and clinical, like they had been reading along, feeling all these emotions and now there’s this sterile part when you’re supposed to learn something, and that it felt a bit like whiplash. But I was really adamant that I wanted to give the reader a tutorial in how they should read, based on the evidence in the book. So if I hadn’t put it in there, I would feel like it’s incomplete, like I had planted the seed, but never showed the flower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 5. The cover to Vojtěch Mašek’s  

The Sisters Dietl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 7. The cover to Srdcovka (Heartcore), 

art by Jislová. 

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

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

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

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

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

 JA: That sounds a little awkward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 9. Film Poster for Havel.

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

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

Fig 10. Film Poster for Jan Palach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 JA: Yeah. No, I can understand that.

 

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

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[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.