“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!

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[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.

Graphic Novel Review: Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.)

 reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Bald by Tereza Čechová (text) and Štěpánka Jislová (ill.); translated by Martha Kuhlman and Tereza Čechová. University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, 2024. 128 pages. $21.95. ISBN: 978-1-63779-080-9. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-080-9.html

Regarding the Czech comics domestic scene, as recently as 2020 scholar Pavel Kořínek could credibly opine: “[A]ny kind of subjective, personal recollection remains extremely rare. Czech comics seem — at least on their most superficial level — curiously de-personalized, de-subjectivized, with genre and fictional works predominant. For some reason, there have emerged very few overtly personal, autobiographical comics in the Czech tradition” (“Facets”: 91). 

    Such statements are less credible today, thanks to more recent publications such as veteran artist Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022) — a work as personalized, subjectivized and autobiographical as anyone could want.

In fact, the landscape was shifting even as Kořínek’s original assessment was seeing print. That same year Czech publisher Paseka released the groundbreaking graphic memoir Bez Vlasů (literally “Without Hair”) by writer Tereza Čechová[1] and artist Štěpánka Jislová.[2] It dealt in intimate detail with the memoirist’s life after a diagnosis, at 30, of alopecia, an autoimmune condition that leads to hair loss. No comics work like it (certainly not in long form) had appeared in the Czech lands before. It would later win the Czech industry’s highest award, the Muriel Prize, for Best Comics Work.

2024 saw the English translation of Bez Vlasů, here rendered as Bald, from Graphic Mundi Press. It is translated by Čechová and Martha Kuhlman, professor of Comparative Literature at Bryant University in Providence, RI and one of the leading US scholars of Czech comics.[3]

It makes sense that Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press, would take up Čechová and Jislová’s prize-winning work, given its Graphic Medicine focus. Penn State is a major US node of the international Graphic Medicine movement, which centers graphic narrative representations of illness, disability and related medical themes.[4]

Bald certainly ventures deep into this territory; the heroine Tereza navigates — at times painfully — alopecia’s effect on her identity as a woman, love life, work relationships and even her pocketbook. I found these scenes on the day-to-day economics of her condition the most illuminating: she expounds on the cost of medication, therapists, wigs, head coverings of different sorts. We also get fascinating discussions on the hair of different races and ethnicities, as well as on the culture and mythology of hair (Samson and Rapunzel are just the tip of the iceberg).

All this is rendered in Jislová’s clean, almost schematic line that exudes a cartoony dynamism. The book uses a two-color scheme of black lines with light reds to produce numerous effects, like the “ghost hair” which Tereza has lost. (In this, Bald recalls Georgia Webber’s split-identity techniques in her 2018 memoir Dumb: Living Without a Voice.)

The author’s one-year journey as depicted makes for quite an emotional roller coaster: despair rubs elbows with enlightened self-acceptance. A storytelling workshop in Scotland proves cathartic. Tereza, like many people nowadays, seeks solace on the internet, only to find confusion and – who’da thunk? – misinformation. A brilliant page design reifies her anxieties and stresses into a fractured three-tier portrait as our narrator tries desperately to forestall the inevitable with useless pills and creams. Another rather chilling episode portrays her at her job, “dealing” with her hair loss by trying to ignore it with overwork. Over eight panels, she melts down in tears before her laptop, then resumes typing with a smile. Finally, another portrait, a splash, shows her weeping on an armchair as supportive comments roll in after her first posting online about her alopecia. This brief catalogue gives a sense, I hope, of Bald’s dizzying affective spectrum. Overall, it paints a powerful picture of physical difference and its mental health/social/cultural ramifications in late capitalism.   

As Čechová told Czech Radio, “I was really worried that the result would seem depressing, because the comic does describe something that is very difficult. But it also brings with it a lot of funny moments. We wanted to show that even if you go through something like this, the world doesn’t fall apart” (Jančíková, “Cesta”). Yet even the “funny moments” tend to have their edge. At one point, Tereza’s boyfriend tells her, “The hair is fine. But not having eyebrows is creepy.” Given that one of Tereza’s fears is living life alone due to her hair loss, that comment seems less than reassuring. 

Other moments I found borderline disturbing. Trying to make herself feel better about her condition at times leads to some dark corners, like this statement, which sounds lamentably eugenicist: “I often think we had it coming. Humans no longer need their hair. It’ll disappear in time. Evolution. Maybe I’m a member of a new … more perfected race. But let me tell you, it’s not easy being one of the first.” This textbox accompanies another portrait, of a half-naked Tereza crying in the mirror.

Something else which some may find rather distancing about Bald: what at times seems like a willful opacity. By that I mean the text proceeds with great economy, with an average of only about 20-25 words per page. It’s almost telegraphic. This puts more of a burden on the art to carry the narrative, which Jislová does more than capably. However, some choices have the effect of keeping the reader (this one, anyway) at arm’s length. Jislová’s figures do not have eyeballs, just black dots for eyes, and a puppet-like angularity to them (Tereza’s nose looks like a sort of stylized diamond or arrow point). This choice risks narrowing the expressive latitude of the characters, like watching a drama acted out with dolls. (Maybe Jiří Trnka dolls? Though a lot of them had eyeballs.) So that when Tereza has tears streaming down her cheeks it might look to some readers as simply grotesque, and be less likely to provoke empathy/understanding.

Furthermore, Čechová’s low word-count writing has a similar coldness and detached matter-of-factness, even when discussing depression, social anxiety, desire. The author seems to acknowledge this stance in a scene where she and her boyfriend are having trouble communicating. “How hard it is for me to talk to anyone about my feelings,” she says in a caption. Finally, I would have appreciated it if Bald had interrogated the class conditions underlying Tereza’s experiences; this is a very middle-class portrait of alopecia, despite the occasional nods to how people without Tereza’s privileges might fare very differently in contemporary Czech society.

These quibbles aside (which in any case might have more to do with my own tastes as a comics reader), Čechová and Jislová’s graphic memoir deserves its reputation for taking Czech comics where they had never ventured before – potently so. As Kořínek himself put it, in a quote highlighted on Paseka’s web page devoted to Bald: “Frankly authentic, light-hearted storytelling, in the context of Czech comics, feels a bit like an epiphany.” All this and cartoony anthropomorphic white blood cells too!

More than anything else, as a graphic memoir, Bald secures Czech comics’ further imbrication with global comics culture. Paseka itself leans into this facet on its web page, claiming the work “continues the rich tradition of autobiographical comics from around the world.” Transnational comics flows (analyzed so well by scholars like Daniel Stein and Kate Kelp-Stebbins) make such a work as Bald all but inevitable, it seems.

Its authors, both born in the post-communist 1990s, represent a younger generation much more closely tied to graphic narrative beyond Czechia’s borders, to say nothing of Central/Eastern Europe’s. Jislová told me she greatly admires Tillie Walden, Kate Beaton, Alison Bechdel and Ulli Lust, global stalwarts all. This makes Bald a work that is very self-aware about the non-Czech traditions that it’s tapping and incorporating. “We felt, as we were working on the book, that this is the first time we’re doing something like this in the Czech comics scene [on this scale],” she said (Jislová interview).

More than anything, the graphic memoir genre gave Čechová and Jislová a framework for a story that they felt had to be told this way. “I’m a big fan of autobiographical comics,” said Čechová, “because they can debunk (detabuizovat) many things and reveal that which we’re not used to talking about. That’s why I started to think that something could come from my experiences” (Jančíková, “Cesta”).

The genie is definitely out of the bottle now. Working on Bald led to Jislová first hitting on the idea of pursuing her own autographical work. The result was her own graphic memoir, Srdcovka (2023). The title is a hard-to-translate slang term that means basically something close to one’s heart and/or that inspires devotion/obsession. It deals with heartbreak, growing up as part of the first generation after communism, sexual abuse and artistic coming of age. Heartcore, the book’s English translation, is due to appear later this year (also from Graphic Mundi, with Kuhlman again translating).

Apart from the authors, the US press and translator deserve praise for bringing this work to an English-speaking readership. We on these shores are chronically, disgracefully bereft of translations of the world’s many vibrant comics cultures, especially those with less common languages like Czech. Thank you.

Kuhlman told me that she and Graphic Mundi had decided on Bald (instead of, say, “Hairless”) for the translated title in part because the English word resonated with “bold.” That adjective, though not at all implied in the original Czech, nonetheless applies to this book – in more ways than one.  

 A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:2. 

CORRECTION Feb 1, 2025:  "Pavel Koržínek" has been corrected to "Pavel Kořínek."

Bibliography

Jančíková, Šárka. “Cesta hrdinky. Autobiografický komiks Bez vlasů o zkušenostech s alopecií se nebojí těžkých témat ani humoru.” Český rozhlas (November 2, 2020). https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/cesta-hrdinky-autobiograficky-komiks-bez-vlasu-o-zkusenostech-s-alopecii-se-8352800.   

Kořínek, Pavel. “Facets of Nostalgia: Text-Centric Longing in Comics and Graphic Novels by Pavel Čech.”  Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Eds. Martha Kuhlman & José Alaniz. University of Leuven Press, 2020:

Interview with Štěpánka Jislová. Prague. June, 2024.

Paseka web page devoted to Bez Vlasů. https://www.paseka.cz/produkt/bez-vlasu/

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[1] Tereza Čechová (née Drahoňovská) (b. 1990) studied journalism and media sciences at Charles University in Prague. She and Jislová established the Prague branch of Laydeez Do Comics, a British women-led comics organization which advances the work of female comics-makers.

[2] Štěpánka Jislová (b. 1992) is a graduate of 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 more recent work includes the superhero satire Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdine na dluh, 2023).

[3] Full disclosure: Kuhlman is a friend; we co-edited the collection Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (University of Leuven Press, 2020). She provided me with a copy of Bald for review.  

[4] Penn State published my 2019 co-edited study, with Scott T. Smith, Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability.