Graphic Novel Review: If I Could But See It: A Graphic Biography of William Morris by Nick Thorkelson

 reviewed by Lee Stephanie Roscoe

Nick Thorkelson. If I Could But See It: A Graphic Biography of William Morris. Edited by Paul Buhle and Mari Jo Buhle. London: Pluto Press, 2026. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/if-i-could-but-see-it/

 

I have never read graphic books, save for Maus, though was a huge fan of Kliban's cartoon Cat books, and of Peanuts, while George Grosz’s savage cartoon caricatures in Ecce Homo were a huge influence on my world view (and my short film, The Warning)—so writing a review of Nick Thorkelson’s nonfiction comic book on the life of William Morris  without immersion in knowledge of the history of this kind of art seems a bit of a stretch for me. 

 

What I do know is that it takes one Renaissance man to know another. Thorkelson is a practitioner of many arts himself, cartoonist, animator, painter, musician, even as Morris was a poet, publisher, editor, architect and perhaps most famously, textile designer (but also designer of stained glass, furniture, books and more)—a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Craft movement. And they share activism towards social and economic justice.

Thorkelson’s book takes us from Morris’s childhood as the son of privilege who father was as a capitalist financier and mine owner -- one of the very oppressors of the working class and defiler of earth Morris would later rail against -- to his college years where he found a life-long circle of friends and co-creators. Thorkelson illustrates how Morris’s reading, his travels, his friends, opened his eyes to horrors of 19^th century industrial civilization, its inequities to humans, its defilement of earth and nature. Striving to cast off what was modern in his time, he was inspired by the churches of Gothic style and the writing of John Ruskin, to, with his circle of friends including  Edward “Ned” Burne-Jones, and poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, create a return to hands-on artisanship which would make houses, furniture, wall coverings accessible to the working man. Ideally with this philosophy participants would attempt to handcraft most of one’s needs and surroundings, thus living a fulfilling, beautiful, and self-provisioned life.

We follow Morris’s epiphanies through the book, his continuous opposition to industrial civilization, and the capitalist order out of which it grew, and his journey towards artisanship to counter the machine age with its exploitation of labor and dirtying of nature by the factories which were anathema to him.

We see the contradictions in his practice—he had rejected becoming a cleric yet found a pagan joy in the Gothic symbolism first created by the church. He wanted to equalize access to art in life, yet it was the wealthy who often commissioned his design company, while the contrast between the luxury of the “Red House” in which he first lived—and the impoverishment of many of his fellow humans was undeniable. His aesthetic, as we see in the book, coupled with an awareness of current events such an uprising in Bulgaria which foreshadowed Marxism with its aspirations for land redistribution, pushed almost inevitability to Morris’s espousing of socialism. We see the circles he travels in, the illustrious fellowship of other socialists such as George Bernard Shaw (albeit before Shaw’s own “becoming” as a playwright). Morris becomes a socialist activist and a founder of socialist organizations as he seeks justice for the working class, traveling through high-flown rhetoric, speeches, slogans and doggerel poetry meant to arouse the masses, arriving at last to some actions which do benefit them --  as all the while his idealism seeks and wishes for a peaceful, artful and equable life for everyone. In the end he returns to creativity as his eternal panacea for the world's ills.

Throughout we get glimpses of Morris’s liberal love affair with his first model, Jane Burden, who became his wife -- famously idealized in many painted images by Rossetti and Burne-Jones, from Persephone to La Belle Iseult. We are first introduced to her working-class background in a funny parsing of her father’s lower-class speech. Thorkelson illustrates Morris' family life, his daughters, and Morris and Jane’s complex Bohemian relationship. He touches on her susbstantial contribution to the creation of designs for Morris's companies, as well as her love affairs with other than her husband..

Thorkelson’s colorful drawings/paintings render beautifully the medievalist/romanticist sensibility of Morris. His graphics cartoonize the main characters but often within lush backgrounds which evoke a contrast between the clutter of an age of dirt-spewing factories, handmaidens of exploitative capitalism, and the natural and political idylls created by or dreamt of by Morris and his cohorts. We enter the mind of Morris; we partake of conversations he may well have had. We see quotes rendered from his prolific writings. The scholarship is excellent, taking the reader into this distant and multi-faceted world of creation, romance,  and political engagement. 

After the main tale, there’s a section of cartoons by Sharon Rudahl parodying the style of Morris’s  Arthurian fantasies and print styles as she changes Pre-Raphaelite finesse into crude proletariat pictures. An insightful afterward by the editors speaks to Morris’s influence on the Arts and Crafts movement, with such as Gustave Stickley and his Craftsman homes, and with comments on other socialist artists who followed in Morris's steps.

On page 10 there is a cast of some characters but I wish there had been a complete cast of characters at the beginning so I would more quickly have understood who Ned or Top was, and better be able to separate and enter the lives of the characters Thorkeslon draws. I’d love some more clarification on the mix and match relationships of lovers or would-be lovers such as  Burne-Jones’s wife and Morris. But it is likely that any confusion is my own lack of knowledge and newness to this art form. The cinematic scope of the drawings and text and its fascinating context will take me back to it again to peruse its characters, to discover more details within its artworks. The book is an exciting introduction for me into the world of cartoon art history books.

Graphic Novel Review Essay: A Brief History of a Long War

by José Alaniz, University of Washington

A Brief History of a Long War by Mariam Naiem, Yulia Vus & Ivan Kypibida. Ten Speed Graphic, 2026. $19.99. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/809143/a-brief-history-of-a-long-war-by-mariam-naiem-illustrated-by-yulia-vus-and-ivan-kypibida/

 

Although the full-scale war in which Russia has sought to conquer Ukraine has raged now for over four years, any Ukrainian will tell you that the conflict between their democratic nation and Putin’s authoritarian imperialist petro-state has actually been going on since 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and started supporting/taking part in a violent separatist movement in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region. But really, they would go on (rightly), Russian aggression against Ukraine has endured for generations, centuries. The only variant has been one of degree: the low simmer of cultural marginalization, mockery and dismissal, the full boil of genocide and war.     

Explaining all of this in a brisk 100 pages of comics is the task set before scholar, activist and journalist Mariam Naiem and artists Yulia Vus and Ivan Kypibida (all Ukrainian), authors of A Brief History of a Long War. This version, from Ten Speed Graphic (a division of Random House), is a translation by Nata Hrytsenko and Naiem of an original 2025 French publication.

We may productively compare the book to the Italian artist Igort’s How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion (2022; English translation 2024) and The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks (2010/2011; translation 2016), as well as, to a lesser extent, Andrew S. Weiss and Brian “Box” Brown’s Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin (2022)[1] and German author Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018). All these works explore the individual’s entanglement with traumatic historical forces and their violent repercussions in the present day.

 ‘Empty Your Plate’

 Subtitled “Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination,” Naiem et al’s book pursues a largely didactic mission. As Naiem explains on her website:     

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have been trying to make the broad English-speaking community understand the cultural context of the Russian war in Ukraine. In particular, I aim to bring understanding of the colonial and racial aspects and practices of Russian culture with respect to Ukraine and other peoples colonized by Russia. 

To that end, the authors of Brief History make a tremendous amount of historical material pertaining to the conflict accessible and relatable, through a deft use of cartooning, infographics and elaborate page designs.

Part of making the (often horrific) nonfiction elements relatable to a presumed non-Ukrainian reader involves the narrative device of Vika, an ordinary young woman who at the beginning of the book is startled awake by missiles exploding near her Kyiv flat in the middle of the night. Checking her phone, Vika moves from her bedroom to a mattress in a corridor. We learn, in a section titled “Living Through War for Dummies,” about “the rule of two walls”: when the bombs are going off, you should always have two barriers between yourself and the exterior; this usually means retreating to a hallway or bathroom.

It’s a clever hook for the reader: Vika’s experience shows the practical realities of living in a conflict zone, opening up all sorts of questions as to what brought us to this point. That query in turn leads her, while waiting for the all-clear, to google the phrase “What is genocide?” into her phone. And we’re off to the races.

It’s a long story that leads us all the way back to the origins of the nation, told mostly in page compositions which at times operate more as illustrations than comics – understandably, given the excess of information to convey. But Vus and Kypibida’s strong visual sense, clean line work, full bleeds throughout and use of color (with oranges, ochre and browns dominant) keep it all organized. Cartoony touches help, too: an hourglass with little hammers and sickles inside instead of sand delivers loud and clear the message that the USSR was living on borrowed time. If you’re going to approach long-form history in comics, this is definitely one way to do it.

In short, Brief History takes us all the way back to Kyivan Rus’, a Slav state founded in 882 CE, encompassing what we know today as Ukraine and much of Western Russia. Although Kyivan Rus’ lost its preeminent status in 1240 CE due to the Mongol Invasion and occupation (which lasted centuries), Russians came to regard the region as the origin of their civilization. (The very term “Kyivan Rus’” was not coined until the 19^th century – by Russian historians.) The authors utilize their visual/verbal “hooks” in clever ways to make this ancient history palatable: we start the section on Kyivan Rus’ through a graphic match by which we “enter” Vika’s bedroom calendar, which is illustrated with a portrait of Prince Volodymyr, who Christianized the people in 988 CE.[2]  

Throughout these historical portions of the narrative, stretching from medieval times and with an emphasis on the last hundred years, the artists playfully mimic the styles of illustrated manuscripts, church iconography, Byzantine paintings, woodblock prints and Soviet graphics, among other fare. Despite the subtle parody, one theme crystallizes: for a very long time, the Russian state has sought to dominate, suppress and even wipe out the Ukrainians and their culture.

Among the most grisly examples we find the Holodomor. The word, meaning “death by starvation,” refers to Joseph Stalin’s explicit policy in the early 1930s to punish peasant resistance to the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet republic of Ukraine by seizing harvests, creating an artificial famine. The Holodomor killed over three million people in Ukraine (other regions suffered terribly as well). Vus and Kypibida depict all this (potentially exploitative) death and destruction through a restrained palette that highlights evil-looking caricatures of Stalin henchmen Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich; dead bodies on Kyiv streets and by a railroad track, seen from a distance; and statistics over a map. Here and throughout, the artists take considerable pains to not sensationalize the human tragedies of genocide and war, overwhelming as they get.     

As it happens – and as with the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by the Turks, the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and other such events – the question of whether or not to classify the Holodomor as a genocide sparked considerable debate. The authors cover the “controversy” in a section titled “Was the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine a Genocide?” Only in 2006 did the Ukrainian parliament recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. And while many other nations did too, Russia never has.

Again, Vus and Kypibida masterfully deploy page composition to make plain the internalized, even banal, repercussions of historically distant events like the Holodomor, which after all happened almost 100 years ago. We see, against a black background, a loaf of bread with a candle, the years “1932-1933” emblazoned along the top. Three overlapping McGuiresque panels descend down the page, each showing families at a meal in different eras (1970, 1990, 2010), all punctuated by the mother figure admonishing the kids, “You must empty your plate.” The final panel shows Vika as a child, reacting to the phrase with a quizzical look. As a reminder that the aggressor’s persecution of Ukraine has never ended, orange flames and smoke lick and spark along the bottom of the composition. Brief History is replete with such displays of how comics, in the words of Hillary Chute, “can make the twisting lines of history readable through form” (199).

Through such compelling techniques, the authors present a centuries-long litany of Russian imperialist abuses against their country. Just to pick another: linguocide; one of many data points: the 19^th-century Valuev Circular, which outlawed Ukrainian in print, and whose eponymous drafter opined, “There was not, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian [derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians] language.” Fast forward to the 21^st century and Putin says exactly the same. And not just about language. This is in fact the whole rationale for the war: the Ukrainians are not really a separate culture or people; they’re just “Nazified” Russians in denial who need to be brought back into the fold. By force. 

There really is no end to such sins, such inhumanity, the authors show. I especially responded to a haunting page made up of photographs of Ukraine’s “Executed Renaissance” generation: the cohort of authors and artists in the 1920s/1930s who spearheaded the development of a new national literature and culture in the hopeful period just after the Revolution. Their scores of portraits descend from red cords, as if they’re all hanged. The final, devastating text box reads: “The Communist government eliminated 80 percent of these artists and intellectuals. Only 36 of 259 Ukrainian writers survived.” 

The War 

As the world saw on February 24, 2022, the Russian military launched an invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. More than 8 million Ukrainians fled the country.

Naiem, Vus and Kypibida cover the highlights and go down some of the byways of what happened since: the repulsion of the invaders; the horrific discovery of tortured and executed civilians in places like Bucha (a suburb of Kyiv) in the wake of the Russian retreat; the devastating battles in the East; the heroic, doomed defenders of Mariupol; Russia’s shelling of non-military targets like apartment blocks, shopping centers and maternity hospitals; the frightfully rising death toll.

These stats and fast-accumulating tragedies can easily overwhelm; throw in the world’s spotty attention span, as well as the clamor of other global crises (like superpower chosen wars in the Middle East), and foreigners can easily forget about Ukraine’s ongoing struggle.

This again, I feel, is why Brief History’s authors resort to the device of the very relatable Vika. Whoever, wherever we are, we could totally see ourselves in her shoes, living in a city reeling from near-nightly missile attacks and explosions. What would we do?     

After she’s spent some time lying in the corridor, Vika’s phone alerts her: “Attack drone threat. Please go to the nearest shelter.” Another “Living Through War for Dummies” section walks us through the basics: checking for supplies and keys to take along (you don’t know for how long), finding the right sort of shelter nearest you, notifying friends and family, hoping your building doesn’t get hit as you go down the stairs. Over two mostly wordless pages totaling ten panels, Vika does so, as a piercing orange graphic overhead signifies an air raid siren. 

As far as bomb shelters go, Vika picks one of the cushier ones. There, she meets several strangers, forming a cross-section of Kyiv society. The encounters allow for exchanges that shed further light on the day-by-day actualities of wartime. But as elsewhere in the book, the past (which is never past) quickly rears its head.

Hence, when someone tells a child not to be scared because “You are going to be a future Cossack!” and the child replies, “Who?”, we fall into another historical rabbit hole. We get a multi-page verbal/visual portrait of the Cossacks, a self-governing, democratically-minded ethnic group, most of which resided in the Ukrainian lands and had a reputation for bravery in battle. Some say Ukrainians regard Cossacks the way US folks see cowboys or the Japanese view samurai: as the reified essence of their national spirit. “The word ‘Cossack’ became a symbol of freedom, courage, and military valor in Ukrainian culture,” a caption explains.

To their credit, the authors do not overly romanticize the Cossacks, whose masculinist warrior culture had its faults.[3] Nonetheless, their appeal is plain when invaders are pounding at the gate: “they remain a symbol of democratic values and resistance to oppression.”

The fellow shelterers, who span the generations, also share their memories of much more immediate historical events: the USSR’s collapse in 1991, the Orange Revolution of 2004, the   2013/2014 Euromaidan protests that ousted the corrupt pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. A series of four vertical panels progressively fill up with the crowds overflowing Independence Square (the text retains its Ukrainian name, Maidan Nezalezhnosti) to demand Yanukovych’s ouster: “[T]he number of people increased day after day.”

Putin, humiliated by the “loss” of Ukraine in the middle of his much-ballyhooed 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, could tolerate none of this; the theft of Crimea and the war in Donbas soon followed. Another composition expresses the stark divisions between Ukraine’s (mostly) Western-leaning, Ukrainian-speaking West and the (mostly) Russia-welcoming, Russian-speaking East through an ugly black rip along one side of a page, overlaid on a mass of separatists rallying under statues of Lenin. “Southwest Against Maidan,” “Yes to the Russian language” some signs say. At top right, a giant hand tugs on the wayward territory, dragging it further East towards Moscow.

For all the torment of a country being torn apart, though, Brief History reminds us that Russia’s recent military incursions “united Ukrainian society and increased the sense of responsibility for the fate of the country.” Vus and Kypibida capture that unity with an image of several people working together to hoist a giant trident or trizub, Ukraine’s national emblem. 

The Downside 

Brief History wants you to take it seriously as a weighty work of popular history that just happens to appear in comics format; among other sources, it references the highly-regarded Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy. It is, furthermore, understandably biased towards a Ukrainian perspective. If the first casualty of war is truth,[4] not far behind is nuance. This is not to argue that the Ukrainians are not on the right side of this war (they are) and the Russians are not on the wrong side (they are). It’s simply to remind us that a text like this one, elaborate and well-crafted as it is, has one primary objective: to, as mentioned, hold the world’s easily-wandering attention on this still-unfolding crime against a peace-loving nation, a peace-loving nation that by the way deserves entry into the EU and NATO. That doesn’t mean one can reduce it to mere propaganda – a position much easier to maintain with the daily pronouncements of Putin and his ilk.      

All the same, I found what Brief History leaves out worth mentioning. Some of it has to do, I think, with the relatively low page count and the concomitant imperative to condense. For example, in the section on Mariupol, a panel shows a Russian bomber dropping munitions on a city block, clearly not a military target. One building has a word, in Cyrillic, written by it in large letters, so as to be seen from the air. You would not know (especially if you don’t read Russian) that the word is deti (children). The scene represents one of the most cruel atrocities of the war, when on March 16, 2022 the invaders bombed a theater in which hundreds of children were sheltering. The adults had written out the word in the square in front of the building as a plea for mercy, which the Russians ignored. The book’s authors are either counting on the reader to have foreknowledge of this event or could not spare the real estate in the panel (nor in the end notes) to explain.

Other choices by Naiem and her collaborators, though, point to a more deliberate strategy to, shall we say, downplay criticism of the Ukrainian war effort. We see no mention of documented problems such as the growing fatigue of the Ukrainian people; the attempts by some young men to illegally leave the country to avoid military service; soldiers abandoning the fight at the front; and reports of corruption in Zelensky’s administration.

A perhaps more egregious offense appears late in the book, when Vika and others speak to some broadcast journalists in the shelter. A Black woman with an Afro holds up a mic to Vika’s face and asks, “What do you want foreigners to know?” I understand that cartooning is an art that often resorts to visual typage (including, historically, of the ethnic and racialized sort) to make legible points to a reader; still I found it a bit lazy and off-putting to reflexively equate Blackness with “foreignness” – not only because there are native Black Ukrainians, but also because of my own awareness of long-standing racism among Eastern European whites. That context makes the Black figure overdetermined in a way that’s distracting to the book’s purposes, in my opinion. Maybe I’m just quibbling? I don’t think so.

In any case, such infelicities, minor as they are, do not overly detract from Brief History’s triumph as a sensitive, very humane work about people living through the worst of times. I especially appreciated how the authors often cut away from (reality-based) fictions like Vika to bring us back to actual individuals in the here and now. One page is comprised of their photorealist portraits: the soldiers Pavlo Kaliuk and Mykyta Zavilinskyi; Dora Chomiak, CEO of the charity Razom for Ukraine; the university lecturer and volunteer Olha Kryvitchenko, all testifying directly to the reader. At the very least a book like this should put faces before us, to help non-Ukrainian readers see the war as something more than a set of far-away abstractions. In this, Naiem, Vus and Kypibida succeed brilliantly.   

Comics and Decolonization 

“[E]ven when we win, it will not bring all of our people back. It will not give us back hours and hours in fear and doubt, wondering if we will survive. But we’d like to believe that justice will prevail.” So, in part, does Vika answer the Black journalist. It is an open-eyed but hopeful summation of what, as you read this, so many in Ukraine are living for. Soon after, she and the other shelterers receive the all-clear, and they scatter for home – the decidedly uncanny “home” of wartime.

I work in a Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. Trained as a Slavist, for the past two decades I have taught and written on the cultural productions of Central/Eastern Europe, especially Russia and the Czech Republic. In the wake of the 2022 full-scale invasion, a decolonization movement has swept Slavic Studies. While Russian expansionism and imperialism are nothing new to those in my field, many of us are not only taking a more critical stance towards how we approach and teach these facts of history and culture; we’re also reassessing the foundations of our training itself.

The fact is that Russia has gotten the lion’s share of attention for so long first and foremost because Slavic Studies in the US emerged during the Cold War, with lots of federal support. It’s not the only game in town, just the biggest. The vast majority of us teach the Russian language and/or Russian material, as opposed to other Slavic languages like, say, Bulgarian or Slovak. Or Ukrainian. Ever since my undergrad days a very long time ago, it’s been more Pushkin, Tolstoy and Bulgakov than Shevchenko, Gombrowicz and Kundera. A lot more. 

The war has cast a harsh light on these blind spots and, frankly, on our professional inertia. Can we ever get away from seeing and teaching the geopolitics of that part of the world primarily through Russian eyes, even when we don’t want to? Cue the hand-wringing.

In 2023 a major institution in my field, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), adopted “Decolonization” as the theme for that year’s conference. It released a statement that read, in part: 

Engaging decolonization … involves re-examining our current research, teaching, and professional practices. How have power relationships and hierarchies within the region and beyond shaped what we study, how we study it, and who has a place at the table? What does it mean to de-center Russian studies, and how should we do so? 

Since then, new and revised curricula and teaching resources have been drawn up with an emphasis on Russia’s former imperialist subject peoples (especially Ukraine). Books like Diversity and Decolonization in Teaching Russian Studies, edited by Thomas Jesús Garza & Rachel Stauffer (2025), are now seeing print (full disclosure: I blurbed it). We don’t send our students to Moscow and St. Petersburg for intensive language study anymore, but to places like Riga and Yerevan.[5] There have been shouting matches, ruffled feathers, intergenerational strife, you name it.[6] I know people who on the day of the full-scale invasion publicly pledged to give up speaking Russian (their mother tongue) and learn Ukrainian. We can’t really get away from the hard questions anymore. The realignment, if that’s what it is, continues.

And in this sense we are allies to folks like Naiem, who on her website describes her work as  “decolonizing the discourse on Ukraine in order to center Ukrainian voices and de-center Russian and pro-Russian imperialist narratives.”

Here is where I think comics might play a useful role, not only nonfiction Ukrainian works like A Brief History of a Long War; the “Witnessing the War” comics section of the news platform War in Ukraine; and Zhenya Oliinyk’s work for the New York Times (and her Instagram), but also genre fare such as the steampunk alt-history series The Will (Volia, 2017) by Viacheslav Buhaiov et al. and the horror-inspired Franko (2022) by Heorhii Babanskyi and Anatolii Bielov, as well as grotesque black comedy like Maksym Palenko’s lacerating daily cartoons, all of which fruitfully tackle the war’s psychological, emotional and physical toll through allegory, exaggeration and the grotesque.[7]  

Comics help in the decolonization project the way they always help: through spatio-temporal alchemy that visualizes how the Holodomor reverberates across generations; turns a group of people together raising a trident into a potent visual symbol of national renewal; taps photorealist portraits to put testifying names to faces, and in myriad other ways makes history grippingly “readable through form.”

Brief History has already prompted me to make some changes in my own teaching. For one thing, some of the book’s infographics are so good, I will likely use them in class.

Most years I teach one of my department’s required courses for Russian Studies majors, RUSS 323: Modern Russian Literature. Given some professional latitude in how to approach the task – and also faced with the ineluctable reality that this material is vast – I have mostly chosen to interpret the term “modern” to mean literature produced in Russia and/or in Russian[8] from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the present.

Sometime around Week 6, we discuss Stalin, the 1930s purges, and their impact on writers like Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Bulgakov and Isaak Babel.[9] In my unit on the forced collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine which produced the Holodomor, I use the word “kulak” – a Russian term – to refer to the middle-class peasants which the Soviets targeted as state enemies, for example in the propaganda slogan “Liquidate the Kulaks as a Class.”

Naiem, Vus and Kypibida’s A Brief History of a Long War reminded me that the Ukrainian equivalent for kulak is “kurkul.” The Holodomor was a tragedy brought down on Ukraine by its age-old oppressors, and it was Ukrainians who endured its agonies. It makes sense to me, then, to use “kurkul” and other such Ukrainian words in this class unit from now on. 

Some of these changes might seem small, but they really aren’t. Decolonization can start with just such tiny shifts in terminology that lead to new perspectives, new ways of understanding – away from the point of view of the victimizers, towards that of those who bore their crimes.

And that makes everything else possible.

Bibliography

Alaniz, José. “Igor Baranko and National Precarity in Ukrainian Comics.” Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Ed. Alaniz & Martha Kuhlman. Leuven University Press, 2020: 215-238.

Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth-Century Literature. Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2006): 199-230.

The Guardian. “Who Coined the phrase, ‘The First Casualty of War is Truth’?”. 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html.

Naiem, Mariam. “About Me.” https://mariam.space/about/.  

Zabuzhko, Oksana. “No Guilty People In The World? Reading Russian Literature After The Bucha Massacre.” Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022). https://www.the-tls.com/literature-by-region/european-literature/russian-literature-bucha-massacre-essay-oksana-zabuzhko.

---

[1] See my review here: https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/accidental-czar-creative-take-putin-biography.

[2] In 2016 – two years after they stole Crimea at gunpoint – the Russians erected a 60-foot statue of Volodymyr just outside the Kremlin walls, along a major traffic artery (you can’t miss it). This was a declaration that he “belonged” to them, not the Ukrainians. The Russians call him by their version of the name, Vladimir, which of course just happens to also be the given name of the current despot – while Volodymyr is that of the current president of Ukraine! Very funny, fate. Incidentally, in folk etymology, the name means “ruler of the world.”

[3] See for example, Isaak Babel’s short story “My First Goose” (1926), set in Ukraine during the Polish-Soviet War era.

[4]  The sentiment, widely attributed to the isolationist Senator Hiriam Johnson in 1918, apparently dates as far back as Samuel Johnson writing in The Idler in 1758: “Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages” (The Guardian, “Who Coined”).

[5] A lot of us are personally boycotting Russia too; I haven’t gone since 2017. That was a terrible trip.  

[6] A 2022 essay by the Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, in which she accused Western Slavists of aiding and abetting Russian aggression by long giving Russian culture a pass, launched a thousand fights. She wrote, “[P]rior to February 24, I had only ever met one European Slavist who, in 2014, deeply disturbed by the Orwellian turn in Moscow, asked forgiveness from Ukrainians for having spent his life looking at Kyiv ‘through Russian spectacles’ as ‘the third city of the Russian Empire’, and for not properly seeing the capital [Kyiv] of a 1,000-year-old local culture, a culture towards which the Russian Empire has behaved much as the Russian Army has behaved in Bucha: what it could steal, it stole, and what it couldn’t, it destroyed. Such realizations may now become more common. Because the road for bombs and tanks has always been paved by books, and we are now first-hand witnesses to how the fate of millions can be decided by our reading choices. It is time to take a long, hard look at our bookshelves” (Zabuzhko).

[7] For a pre-2022 discussion of Ukrainian comics and national precarity, see Alaniz. 

[8] Some of the works we cover are by émigré authors who left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.

[9] As it happens, two of these writers have strong connections to Ukraine. Bulgakov grew up in Kyiv, Babel lived in Odesa.

Graphic Novel Review - Will Eisner: A Comics Biography by Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur

 

Reviewed by Edward Whatley, Professor of Library Science, Russell Library, Georgia College & State University

Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur. Will Eisner: A Comics Biography. NBM Graphic Novels, 2025. ISBN: 9781681123578. $29.99. https://nbmpub.com/products/will-eisner

 The early life and career of the late Will Eisner have been chronicled extensively in biographies such as Will Eisner: A Spirited Life and Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.  Eisner himself discussed his formative years in numerous interviews and authored autobiographical graphic novels that portrayed his life and world during those times: specifically, The Dreamer (Princeton, Wisconsin: Kitchen Sink Press, 1986) and To the Heart of The Storm.  The title under review here, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography by Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur, is also told via Eisner’s chosen medium of the graphic novel.  While Weiner and Mazur did not have the advantage of being present for the events they are portraying, their account of Eisner’s early life and career often seems more objective and honest than Eisner’s own idealized portrayal of himself and his times.

A brief prologue chronicles the early lives of Eisner’s immigrant parents Fannie and Sam, their marriage, and the births of their sons Will (1917) and Julian (1921).  Chapter one begins in 1925 with the Eisners engaged in what was becoming a familiar routine: moving out of their apartment in the middle of the night to avoid the landlord. In their depiction of the Will’s nomadic childhood, Weiner and Mazur effectively establish how the conflicting worldviews of his parents shaped Will own psyche. Sam encouraged Will’s creative inclinations but was not an effective breadwinner.  Fannie was constantly complaining that the family’s modest circumstances were the result of Sam’s lack of practicality. As a witness to this ongoing marital conflict, Will gradually internalized and reconciled these points of view, becoming both an accomplished creator and an astute businessman. Weiner and Mazur’s skillful and affectionate depiction of how this process played out in Will’s mind and in his actions and choices is what makes Will Eisner: A Comics Biography such an enjoyable story.

Weiner uses dialogue very efficiently to reveal much about a character in a few words while Mazur’s impressionistic drawing style also shows much about a character in a few lines. The characters all talk, move, and emote in ways that bring them to life on the page and would likely have impressed Eisner himself.  The creators also provide informative history lessons on topics such as pulp magazines, Superman, and even how comics were printed in the 1930s.  These interludes serve to give modern readers a better understanding of the early days of comics, an era that is now almost a full century in the past.

Longtime Eisner fans will already be familiar with many of the events in Will Eisner: A Comics Biography. As mentioned above, Eisner covered much of the same ground in his autobiographical graphic novels The Dreamer and To The Heart of the Storm. But while The Dreamer in particular suffered from a mawkish sentimentality, Weiner and Mazur are interested in providing a more honest portrayal of their subject and his world.  This is perhaps most evident in their handling of the court case of DC vs. Victor Fox.  Victor Fox was a publisher who wanted to cash in on the Superman craze by hiring the Eisner and Iger shop to create a similar character named Wonder Man.  Eisner designed the character and produced the story to Fox’s specifications.  DC Comics promptly sued Fox for copyright infringement. Fox instructed Eisner to claim under oath that Wonder Man was Eisner’s own idea.  In Eisner’s portrayal in The Dreamer of the events that followed, he took the stand and told the truth, thus losing the case for Fox (fig. 1). In the years since the publication of The Dreamer, transcripts of the court case have become available to the public and they reveal that Eisner did in fact comply with Victor Fox’s instructions to claim that Wonder Man was Eisner’s own creation.  Eisner even claimed to have never read Superman while working on Wonder Man (fig. 2).  Eisner made this claim despite having received a submission for Superman from Siegel and Schuster before the character appeared in Action Comics.  So at worst, Eisner’s telling of the story was untruthful.  At best, he was misremembering events.  But in either case, his account of the story was completely inaccurate.  Weiner and Mazur, however, used the court transcripts as the basis for their version and readers therefore get a more accurate account of events.

Fig. 1

 

Fig. 2

 

While Eisner’s portrayal of himself in The Dreamer is that of a rather guileless romantic, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography gives us a more believable (and probably more accurate) view of the young Eisner.  To his credit, he was an enthusiastic advocate for the potential of comics as a valid medium for the telling of mature stories. But in Weiner and Mazur’s hands, Eisner also harbored a somewhat peevish resentment for the superhero genre.  He displayed no reservations about working in other formulaic genres, reserving his disdain solely for costumed characters.  As Weiner and Mazur infer, this may have been the result of his declining to publish Superman (and forfeiting the potential financial windfall) when he had the chance.

Eisner is also shown to sidestep his self-professed commitment to comics as a true literary form and instead embrace some of the more unfortunate pop culture tropes of the time, specifically in his early portrayal of the Spirit’s African American assistant/sidekick Ebony White. When confronted with complaints that Ebony was a caricature, Eisner’s response is simply, “Well of course he’s a caricature – it’s a comic strip.  How else do they expect me to draw a Black sidekick?!”   Though Eisner began to portray Ebony with more sensitivity in the post-war Spirit stories, the character’s basic design and speech patterns remained the same, ensuring a strip which was visionary in many respects would always appear dated in its portrayal of one of the principal characters.

None of this is to say this Will Eisner biography reads like a hit piece or that Eisner is presented as an unlikable person.  Eisner was a tireless advocate for comics as a legitimate art form, a singularly innovative practitioner, and an ambitious but scrupulous businessman. All these qualities are present in Wiener and Mazor’s handling of their subject.  The book covers Eisner’s post Spirit life and work in a breezy manner, giving the most attention to the events leading to his creation of A Contract with God and his struggle to find a publisher.  Jeff smith provides an affectionate afterward that highlights how Eisner served as a source of encouragement and inspiration to younger creators.

Will Eisner A Comics Biography will be an enjoyable and informative reading experience for both longtime Eisner fans and those seeking an accessible introduction to the man and his work.

From Film to Panels: Tim Disney on The A.R.C., Comics, Satire, and the Politics of Truth

Interview by Fer García  

Tim Disney's The A.R.C. begins with an unsettling premise: a pandemic in which lying itself becomes contagious. The resulting graphic novel combines political satire, speculative fiction, social commentary, and an extensive supplementary "compendium" that expands the book's concerns into questions of history, race, labor, climate change, power, and public discourse.

For Disney, however, the most interesting question may be the medium itself. Although he initially approached The A.R.C. through his experience in film and screenwriting, the process eventually forced him to rethink how a story is constructed for comics. In our conversation, he reflects on the differences between film and sequential art, the role of abstraction, the reader's participation in constructing meaning, and why comics may offer a particularly effective way of confronting difficult ideas.

You initially conceived The A.R.C. as a movie. Why choose comics for this message?

The project actually began as a movie. I wrote it during the pandemic, and I had a producer who was interested in making it. He introduced me to someone who had worked extensively in graphic novels, and the suggestion was made to turn it into one.

I thought, "Oh, that will be fun," and then discovered that it was neither fast nor easy. I teamed up with my co-writer, J.C. Lys, who essentially became the producer and creative director, and he brought in the artist Vincent Dubour.

Because of my experience writing screenplays, I initially approached the book in screenplay format. Looking back, I wouldn't do it that way again. If I make another graphic novel, I would try to compose it directly in comic form—to think about the panels and the story natively in that format.

I tended to overwrite. There were too many words. Eventually I realized that I had to think differently. Comics are about economizing wherever you can, and once I understood that, we became much more efficient.

What can comics do particularly well when dealing with subjects such as misinformation and social criticism?

I'll be curious to hear what you think because you're much more of a student of this than I am.

There is something about graphic treatment that gets filtered through the human subconscious. There's a difference between an illustration and a photograph. Something happens as the image passes through us. The artist has an intention, but what comes out isn't entirely that intention. Something else happens too. It becomes humanized, in spite of ourselves.

Then there is the panel-to-panel experience and the way our eyes move over a page. It's different from reading a book. To me, it suggests something about the episodic way memory works and the way our brains organize information.

We see an image, or a series of images, or an action—a jump between one moment and the next—and we fill in everything else. There's a lot of background processing in our brains that fills in information. That's how I think memory works, and there's something powerful about that. Maybe that's part of why comics are such a successful format for memoirs.

You are describing something more than simply a visual version of a written story. Are you suggesting that the gaps between panels actually become part of the storytelling?

Yes. I think the way the reader fills in those gaps is important. Our brains are constantly economizing on energy. We don't process everything around us equally; we make assumptions about what is happening outside the center of our attention.

Comics seem to engage with that process. You give the reader certain pieces of information and the reader constructs what happens between them.

You have also worked in film, technology, business, and nonprofit leadership. What made comics the right tool at this particular moment in your career?

There wasn't really one particular reason. I have this tendency not to fully understand how difficult something is going to be before I start it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't do many of these things.

I thought, "Oh, this will be fun," and then you get into it and think, "Oh my God, this is so hard. It takes so long. It's much more complicated than I thought."

But that's also how good things happen. You meet new people, you work with teams, and it becomes a great experience. If I had fully understood how involved it was going to be, I'm not sure I would have done it. But I'm very glad that I did.

At one point, the project changed significantly when you decided to include the compendium. What happened?

The compendium was where the project took a different turn.

For a while, we were focused primarily on the illustrated story pages. Then we realized that we had an opportunity to create something denser and different. That made me more comfortable being earnest and talking about things like climate change, labor relations, history, and race.

Those were subjects I wanted the book to address but didn't know how to incorporate into the story pages in a way that was palatable and didn't become too pedantic.

The compendium gave us a place to do that.

That raises an interesting question about the relationship between the narrative and the material surrounding it. Do you see the compendium as commentary on the story, or as part of the storytelling itself?

I think it became part of the world we were building.

There are layers and layers of assumptions in the world we live in, and the extensive footnotes and connections gave us a way to suggest how dense that world is—how much we assume, and how much we should question the things we think we know.

It allowed us to create connections between all these different subjects rather than simply presenting them as isolated arguments.

The book is deliberately satirical, but you decided to make a number of real public figures recognizable. Was that a difficult decision?

It was a scary decision.

We had originally gone most of the way through the project using analogues for real people. Near the end, we asked ourselves why we were doing that. So we went back and put the real people in.

Those people don't necessarily like being made fun of, and they have a lot of money. So yes, it's scary.

But we have strong free-speech protections in this country, at least theoretically, and there's a great tradition of making fun of public figures. I think that's an important corrective.

Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken are part of that tradition, and today many of the people willing to say uncomfortable things publicly are comedians—people like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. People who have money at stake tend to keep their mouths shut.

One of the book's central concerns is the collapse of trust. What interests you about trust as a social force?

Some basic level of trust is required for anything to happen.

We made a real effort to be fair and even-handed in the satire. We tried to point out hypocrisies on the left, the right, and everywhere in between, because there's plenty to go around.

The idea isn't simply to tell people which side is right. It's to look at the ways in which we have become accustomed to accepting things that perhaps deserve more scrutiny.

Comics have often been dismissed as entertainment, yet they can address subjects that other forms struggle to approach. Why do you think comics are particularly powerful for difficult conversations?

I think it has something to do with abstraction from real life.

Even in a movie, if you're using actors and talking about deep subjects, it can become uncomfortable because you're looking at an actual person. If you create a layer of abstraction—talking animals, superheroes, or whatever metaphor you're using—I think it suppresses the fear response in us.

It allows us to take on ideas without immediately freaking out.

The reader has less resistance because it's "just a comic book." It's not a documentary. It's not a movie. It's not a conventional book.

You spent several years working in Disney's animation department. What did that experience teach you about storytelling?

What I experienced there was a culture of quality—the idea that you should make something as good as it can possibly be.

You can have a good idea and smart people and get something to 85 or 90 percent fairly quickly. Getting that final five or ten percent requires a great deal of additional time and energy. Disney had a culture built around making that effort.

It was also a very collaborative environment. I was in the story department. We worked with storyboards; I would write dialogue, artists would create panels, and we would present sequences to everybody. Everyone contributed ideas.

It was the opposite of the auteur idea that there is one genius who has all the ideas. Ultimately someone has to make decisions, but the best idea could come from anybody. That was a great experience.

You have spent significant parts of your life in artistic and entrepreneurial environments. Many people see those worlds as opposites. Why do you think that divide exists?

There's something strange about the way culture works. What we might call "high culture" is largely funded by philanthropic money. Museums and similar institutions are funded by wealthy people.

And where do those people get their money?

They get it from the corporate world.

These things are intertwined inextricably, but we create this false separation between them.

If an independent comics creator told you, "I want to make meaningful work without sacrificing sustainability," what would you tell them?

I suppose I'd say don't print paper copies.

But one of the beautiful things about this world is the physical book. When the first box of galleys arrived, there was something deeply satisfying about taking the book out and realizing: "Look, we made something. It's a thing. It's an actual thing."

I love that about graphic novels. Readers are very devoted to the physical books.

But obviously, physical production has consequences. Our book was printed in Malaysia and then has to be shipped around the world. Once you start pulling on that thread, it's difficult to know how to make value judgments about what resources are worth expending.

Looking back across film, technology, philanthropy, and now comics, what thread connects all those pursuits?

I'm not sure there is one.

I like trying new things. I like new challenges, complicated problems, and working with teams. That's what attracted me to this project.

And ultimately, I like the idea of trying to put something good into the world and hoping that it has some value that I can't necessarily articulate in advance.

The book is aggressively satirical and sometimes quite dark. What do you hope readers discover beneath that surface?

I think there is a real, earnest strain of hope and optimism in the book.

I hope people see that.

And I particularly encourage readers to go all the way through the supplementary material, because there are connections between all the different things in there. That's my favorite part.

---

Tim Disney is a filmmaker, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He has worked in film and animation, including a period in Disney's animation department, and has been involved in technology and media ventures. The A.R.C. is his first graphic novel.

Fernando García Cruz is a comics scholar, educator, and entrepreneur whose work focuses on comics, creative entrepreneurship, transmedia storytelling, and the relationship between comics and the creative economy.

The Comics Archive in Sweden -- Cultural Heritage, Preservation and Promotion (UPDATED)

 The Comics Archive in Sweden -- 

Cultural Heritage, Preservation and Promotion

 Fredrik Strömberg

 As more academics, journalists, and historians wish to research and write about comics, there is an increasing need for source materials. However, because of cultural and societal forces not always having been altogether positive concerning the comics, much material has historically been lost. Official archives might not have been, or indeed, still may not be interested in safeguarding artifacts from comics history (Nilsson and Storn, 2003A: 24).

An illustration made by the Swedish comics artist Mats Källblad to commemorate the start of the Comics Archive, depicting several classic Swedish comics characters such as 91:an, Adamson, Bamse, Kronblom och Ensamma mamman (The Single Mother). 

Starting a dedicated archive to facilitate the preservation of the cultural heritage of comics might be a solution, but also a road full of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, not the least concerning financing the enterprise, as well as the long-time safeguarding of the material collected. As an inspiration, this is the story of how the leading comics archive in Northern Europe dedicated to the comics came to be -- despite odds, in some ways, being stacked against it.

Why a Comics Archive?

The initial logo for the joint venture of Svensk Seriearkiv (Swedish Comics Archive) and Svensk Seriehistoria (Swedish Comics History). 

 

The premium publication of the Comics Archive is Svensk Seriehistoria (Swedish Comics History), a series of high-quality hardcover volumes, each focusing on a specific era, with lengthy articles and interviews. This is the very first one. So far, four volumes have been published since the start in 2004, with a fifth planned for 2026.

 

In 1997, when I became president of the Swedish Comics Association -- a non-profit organization started in 1968 to promote the comics, it soon became evident that the 30^th anniversary of the association was just around the corner. I had also become one of the editors of the association’s journal, Bild & Bubbla, and we recognized there was a need to write an article on the history of the association. However, it turned out that gathering information for this was not as easy as it might have seemed. The responsibility of organizing the association had been passed between many different hands during almost three decades, and even though it seemed the people who had been working with the association often had kept documents produced within the organization, nothing had ever been centrally collected. The physical artifacts recording the history of the association was thus dispersed in various attics and cellars across Sweden (Strömberg, 2013: 7).

So, we decided to start an archive for the association, and archivist Thomas Storn started traveling around Sweden, collecting official documents, photographs, correspondence, news clippings, and catalogues (Didring Leksell, 2023: 25). A favorite place of retrieval was a (thankfully) abandoned henhouse, belonging to the parents of a person formerly active in the running of the association (Nordström, 2025).

All these activities led to discussions on what was preserved concerning comics history in Sweden in general. In 2001, we applied for and received a small private grant to do an inventory of how artifacts from comics history were being kept in the official Swedish archives. This entailed, among other things, having Storn, who by then was responsible for what was initially titled “Projekt Svensk Seriehistoria” (Project Swedish Comics History), take a trip around Sweden, visiting archives and interviewing their staffs about the preservation of comics history (Nilsson, 2002: 9). The results were not satisfying, to say the least. The official Swedish archives have been assigned to preserve everything ever printed in Sweden -- a system started already in 1661 -- and they mostly do. However, many of the older comic books seemed to have disappeared over the years, as they were presumably not deemed the most important cultural artifacts to preserve, or were commercially valuable enough to steal. Worse was that there seemed to be no institutions interested in preserving unique materials, e.g. manuscripts, originals, and correspondence (Nilsson and Storn, 2003b: 5).

This, combined with the fact that there were recurring reports on comics publishers throwing away crates upon crates of unique material when moving and/or just to save space, or relatives of deceased comics artists having to resort to selling or throwing things out, made us realize that something had to be done. We applied for and got a bigger, governmental grant to lay the groundwork for a proper archive, and even though we found no way of securing a continuous funding, we went ahead with the project based on a determination to do our best to preserve the Swedish comics cultures (Nilsson, 2004: 16). The archive was officially started in Autumn 2003, but a press conference about our intentions had been held already in June that year, at the National Archives in Stockholm, combined with the debut of an exhibition on Swedish comics history. This event gained a fair amount of attention in the media and helped kick start the project, initiating a steady flow of donations that has since built the entire archive (Nilsson and Storn, 2003a: 24).

Swedish Comics History

 The archive was officially started as part of the Swedish Comics Association, led by Storn, and with a dedicated working group including Jakob Hallin, Peter Nilsson, and Claes Reimerthi (Nilsson, 2003: 12).

Initially, the effort was divided into two separate though interlinked projects. One was simply called Svenskt Seriearkiv (The Swedish Comics Archive), aimed at kick starting an archive and collecting all the physical material possible. The other was termed “Svensk Seriehistoria” (Swedish Comics History), a concentrated effort to interview as many people as possible from Swedish comics cultures, making sure that information that had not been written down was also preserved. As this effort was initiated in the early 2000s, it was decided to focus on people that had been part of the launch of comic books publishing in Sweden in the 1940s and 1950s, since they were still available for interviews. The project group interviewed many people, focusing specifically on the less public editorial side of the business, as the artists had often already been interviewed multiple times (Nilsson and Storn: 7). These interviews were lengthy, and sometimes performed at consecutive meetings, giving the interviewers time to digest the answers, research further, and prepare for more in-depth follow-up questions. At this point, these interviews were also producing so much original information about the history of comics in Sweden that repeat meetings were required as new lines of inquiry constantly arose. Within a few years, the project had produced more than 100 hours of interviews, and managed to transcribe most of them, making the material available for researchers, but also for the production of articles, books, and exhibitions.

The group also interviewed comics artists, especially the ones with long and influential careers, and in the case of artists no longer alive, remaining relatives were located and interviewed (Nilsson and Storn, 2003a: 7). During these interviews, the representatives of the archive were often given privy to unique materials, such as photos, manuscripts, and correspondence, which had frequently been donated and/or photographed, thus adding to the historical material concerning the themes of the interviews (Storn, 2013: 3).

These interviews were also used as the basis for a book series with the same name as the project, i.e. Svensk Seriehistoria, generous (300+ pages) hardcover volumes with lengthy articles and interviews focusing on different eras in Swedish comics history. So far, there has been four volumes, one each focusing on the 1950s and 1960s and two on the 1970s. A fifth, focusing on the important Northern Europe publisher Bonniers and its various comic publishing endeavors since the 19^th Century, is forthcoming in 2026 (Strömberg, 2025: 17).

Even though it has since been decided that there was no need for a separately-titled project for the interviews, we have continued to do them, and, to date, we have more than 100 longer interviews made for the archive, and more added continuously.

  From Lund to Malmö

Project manager and archivist Thomas Storn at the initial incarnation of the Comics Archive in the early aughts, when it was situated at Arkivcentrum Syd (Archival Centre South) in Lund and comprised between 20 and 30 shelf meters.

 When the archive was started, it was decided that the materials collected should be preserved in the best way possible, i.e. in a professional archival milieu. In 2004, we started hiring shelf space at Arkivcentrum Syd (Archival Centre South) in Lund, the largest archival compound in Northern Europe, situated near Lund University, one of the most prestigious universities in Sweden. This assured that the material was always kept in a locked and secure area, at 18 degrees Celsius and 40 percent humidity, perfect for long-term preservation (Zimmerman, 2013: 54).

We were able to do this as we became members of Skånes arkivförbund (The Archival Association of Scane), an organization for archives in southern Sweden that had an agreement with the Arkivcentrum Syd that meant that small archives could rent shelf space by the meter for a nominal fee. We started out with less than 30 shelf meters, and the rent for this was paid several years by a share of that initial governmental grant kept for this specific purpose.

However, after several years in Lund, the city archivist of Malmö contacted the Swedish Comics Association and offered not only shelf space within the City Archive, but also administrative rooms for sorting, registering, and digitizing. We accepted, and the archive, which, by then, encompassed more than 200 shelf meters, was moved, one van at a time, and installed in Malmö in 2014. The placement within the City Archive of Malmö means that the materials are still kept at the correct temperature and humidity, makes the archive officially part of the comics cluster labelled Seriestaden (The Comics City of Malmö), and moved the archive closer to the University of Malmö, which has been very interested in collaborations.

 Collections and Archives

 The archive has grown exponentially for more than two decades and, today, it encompasses about 1,200 shelf meters of material. Almost everything preserved in the archive has been donated, since it does not have funds to purchase. However, there has been a steady stream of private donations from collectors and artists, and from publishers, syndicates, and similar organizations, often in bulk. During the last few years, the Swedish subsidiary of Egmont -- the biggest publisher of comics in Northern Europe, completely overhauled its own archive, discarding several trucks load of materials that was subsequently donated to the Comics Archive (Strömberg, 2024: 13). 

From the Archive, a Swedish broad sheet with the notes and lyrics to Musse Pigg-valsen (The Waltz of Mickey Mouse), from the 1930s.

 What does the Archive collect and preserve? We try to get two copies of everything comics-related ever published in Sweden: one to be used for research purposes and one simply for long-term archiving. We also collect foreign editions of comics, especially if they, in any way, relate to Swedish comics cultures. We, for instance, collect journals, books, academic dissertations, etc. about comics in any language for reference. Comics publications in other languages are not deemed our first priority, as they are presumably kept in other archives across the globe, and, thus, only one copy is kept. More on this later.

The Archive contains about 40,000 originals, with everything from rough sketches to painted covers.

However, we collect so much more, and it is often these things that are the most interesting. From artists, we get sketches, manuscripts, and originals -- showcasing the artistic processes behind comics. From publishers and editors, we get production materials, such as proofs, reproduction and printing films, coloring instructions, physical cut-and-paste versions of comics pages, and so on, showcasing the production processes involved in communicating the comics. We also get correspondence, advertising, financial documents, and much, much more.

The archive is organized in the same way as most archives, i.e. into separate personal archives based on donations of unique materials from specific persons and/or organizations, but also as collections of specific publication formats, such as comic books, graphic novels, fanzines, books, and journals about comics.

Every time someone donates a comic book, magazine, journal, graphic novel, or any other comics-related printed matter, it is registered and added to the collections. If it’s in Swedish and the archive already has a copy, the second copy is kept in the secondary collection. If the archive already has two copies, all copies are compared and the two copies that are in the best shape are kept, with the third sent to storage to be sold to help finance the archive. We have today more than 70 percent of everything comics related ever published in Sweden and are constantly adding new items to the collections (Strömberg, 2025: 10).

If a professional person or organization in the comics business donates unique material from their comics-related profession, that will also be registered but will constitute a separate archive in the name of said person or organization. In the archive, we, at the moment, have 178 separate archives, ranging from script writers -- e.g. Janne Lundström and Claes Reimerthi; comics artist -- e.g. Ottilia Adelborg, Natalia Batista, Malin Biller, Bud Grace, and Johan Wanloo; editors -- e.g. Ulf Granberg (Fantomen), Kjell Ståhl (Svenska MAD), and Nisse Larsson (DN-serien); publishers -- e.g. Bonnier Carlsen, Egmont, and Ingemar Bengtsson (Optimal Press); syndicates -- Bulls Presstjänst and PIB; organizations -- e.g. Seriefrämjandet/The Swedish Comics Associations, Serieteket, and Serieskolan/The Comics Art School; and historians/scholars -- e.g. Olle Dahlöf and Sture Hegerfors (The Swedish Comics Academy). The donations range from artists donating a few originals, to publishers donating production material by the truckloads. In 2024 alone, we got the equivalent of 60 pallets of donated materials (Strömberg, 2025: 12).

The two different ways of organizing are based on the idea of the material being easy to access for those working with the archive, but also for visitors. If you want to read a year’s worth of a certain comic book title, the issues should all be collected in a dedicated box and not dispersed in the archive based on whomever donated the individual issues. On the same principle, materials concerning the work of a specific artist, editor, or publisher is most easily accessed as a separate entity within the archive, instead of, for instance, sorting this kind of materials thematically.

A major donation on a specific theme might start out as an archive but develop into a collection. This has, for instance, happened with a donation by Swedish comics historian Svante Kjellberg, who had what was probably the largest collection of American underground comics in Northern Europe. He donated his collection to the archive, and it was deemed both interesting and substantial enough to start a new collection specifically for underground material that has since been added to by further donations (Strömberg, 2023: 29). Another example of this is an expansive donation of material from Museum Kasper, a former museum for early 19^th Century comics-related art and publications. This has also become a separate collection on the theme of caricature journals, with materials continually added to it.

These collections still retain the name of the original donor, and all the materials can still be traced back to whomever donated it through a paper with a code that is inserted into each of the objects when registered, signifying the donor and the date of the donation. At the same time, the materials get easier to access for everyone involved as it gets placed at one physical location.  

Exhibitions and Events 

At the tenth anniversary of the Swedish Comics Archive, a celebration was organized, with a conference and the debut of two exhibitions at Arkivcentrum Syd, the original venue for the Archive.

 

We announced the start of the archive with an event and an exhibition and communicating the information contained in the materials has always been an important part of the assignment of the archive. The archival facilities in Lund where the archive started its existence had auxiliary, public spaces which were used for various activities, including a large conference to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the archive in 2013. This was done with, among other events, the debut of two major exhibitions, the publishing of a special issue of the journal Bild & Bubbla, and, not the least, a full day of lectures and on-stage discussions with artists, publishers, editors and researchers (Mani, 2014: 23).

To maximize the number of people reached, the exhibitions produced for the archive have mostly been made to be mobile, consisting of printed roll-ups that can easily be packaged, transported, and employed in more or less any kind of location. They have been shown throughout Sweden for the last decade or so, often combined with lectures from the curator and/or workshops with local comics artists. We have made an exhibition based on my book, Swedish Comics History (Strömberg, 2010), but also on the oft forgotten history of comic books geared towards female audiences. Recently, we made an exhibition about the history of comic book publishing in Sweden, which is on its third showing. These exhibitions are often showcased at public libraries and/or culture houses, which exist in most towns in Sweden.

We also partake in the recurring comics festivals in Sweden, with booths for showcasing our books and recruiting members, but also often with on-stage events, such as presentations of materials from the archive and interviews with editors and publishers.

Lately, we’ve also produced several events in collaboration with the earlier mentioned Malmö University: smaller symposiums and larger conferences discussing, from various viewpoints, the meetings of academic research and the materials in archives. These events have been international in scope, and have often had guest speakers, e.g. Karen Green, curator for comics and cartoons, Columbia University Libraries, US; Catherine Ferryerolle, the archives at La Cité Internationale de la Bande dessinée d’Angoulême, France; Philippe Capart, La Crypte Tonique, Belgium, and Richard Graham, The Comics and Visual Resources Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, US (MUCH, 2022).

We often participate in an annual meeting of people working with comics archives, museums, and libraries, organized by the earlier mention Ferryerolle at the archival unit of La Cité in Angoulême, France. These meetings are important, to learn from one another on how to manage and build these collections and archives, and to know what materials are preserved and where to find them. The comics cultures of the world are interlinked in so many ways, and since no one archive can preserve everything, It is necessary to complement one another’s collections. 

Books and Publications 

Since the Archive became its own organization there have been yearbooks produced, containing shorter articles about materials found in the Archive.

 

Another way we try to make sure that the material in the archive is kept relevant is through publications in articles and books. Throughout the years, a number of visiting authors, journalists, and researchers have used material from the archive for their publications, and this is on the rise, with more requests for visits to the archive.

The publications produced as part of the running of the archive include the already-mentioned flagship book series, Svensk Seriehistoria, which is not the only publishing venue. In 2024, as part of the new organization, we introduced a yearbook, a publication containing articles based on material contained in the archive. The articles vary from analyses of a single cover to overviews of whole publishing ventures but also contain interviews with donors of materials to the archive, and a documentation of the year at the archive. These yearbooks are only available to members of the archive; so far; we’ve produced two, with a third in production.

There is the book series, Seriearkivet Presenterar (The Comics Archive Presents), monographs collecting classic Swedish comics, augmented with lengthy prefaces presenting the artists, the comics and the circumstances surrounding their original publications. These vary from facsimile editions of older comic collections to those of comics that had only been serialized in daily, weekly or monthly publications. Finally, we publish one-off books, such as a book about the Swedish comics script writer par excellence, Claes Reimerthi, who not only was part of starting the archive, but whose whole book collection and professional archive was donated by his daughters when he passed away a few years ago.

These endeavors, i.e. articles and books, but also exhibitions, seminars, and lectures, are done to preserve the materials in the archive, and made to come alive, being part of our society and culture again, which we deem an important part of curating the archive. 

A Scandinavian Archive 

The new logotype for the Archive, adopted after the name change to simply Seriearkivet, i.e. The Comics Archive.

 

The Comics Archive is situated in Sweden, but we do collect material from other countries if they connect to Swedish comics cultures. We have, for instance, an extensive collection of the French magazine, Journal de Spirou, back to the 1950s. The serialized comics in that magazine have often been translated and published in Sweden in various formats, and are, thus, interesting for translation research. On the same note, we also have a complete collection of the US MAD Magazine as a complement to the Swedish edition that was published between 1960 and 2002, as well as an archive donated by Kjell Ståhl, one of the last editors of the Swedish edition (Strömberg, 2023: 40).

From the earlier-mentioned donation with artifacts from Museum Kasper, the archive also has a sizeable collection of satirical journals from all over Europe, stemming from the heyday of this early publication platform for comics, i.e. mid-19^th Century up until the mid-20^th Century. Combining this international collection with an extensive collection of Swedish satirical journals from the same period invites historical comparative studies, as these journals seem to have been collaborating across geographical and cultural borders, not only translating and exchanging comics, but also presumably exchanging visual ideas back and forth, an under-researched area in comics history (see, Strömberg, 2023: 36).

The interconnectedness of Swedish comics cultures to the rest of the world, and especially to our region in Northern Europe, has always been something we’ve been aware of when curating the archive. The idea of a more collaborative effort for preserving the shared comics history led to a project where I traveled to our Nordic neighbors in the early 2020s, visiting their official, governmental archives, talking to the staff about the preservation of comics, but also talking to people interested in either running or starting up national archives for comics in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway. The conclusions were, 1. that the comics history and culture of Northern Europe is indeed intricately intertwined through publishers, syndicates, and artists, who have throughout the last two centuries often been working with Northern Europe as their market; and 2. that there were few other organizations doing what we do and, thus, a need for the archive to start accepting material from our neighbors, materials that otherwise risked being lost.

As a result of this, we decided to help work for the establishing of more comics archives in Northern Europe. Seeing that this will most likely take time, we also changed the name of the archive from The Swedish Comics Archive, to simply The Comics Archive in order to prepare for adding material from the other countries in Northern Europe (Strömberg 2025a: 8).

There is, at the moment, no active comics archive in Denmark, and the archive has thus been asked to help preserve Danish material. To do this, we started by changing the way we organize, catalogue, and persevere Danish comics, making them equal in our systems to comics from Sweden, i.e. we strive to archive two copies of all comics-related publications, but also to actively collect unique Danish material. We started by helping to retrieve all comics-related materials from the estate of legendary Danish publisher Jens Peder Agger, who was instrumental in introducing French and Belgian comics albums into Northern Europe, and among other things, acted as the international agent of Will Eisner. We also got the archive from the Danish syndicate PIB, which was kept in a cellar, risking being thrown away. After this, more donations came, and the Danish part of the archive is growing. We have also become more active in collecting material from Denmark, for instance taking part in the comics festival Copenhagen Comics, asking all participating publishers to donate copies of their books. 

Paw Mathiasen, the current steward at the Danish syndicate PIB proudly donating a unique filling cabinet containing all the records of the sales of syndicated comics all over the world and throughout most of the 20th century.

So, we are now officially a Scandinavian comics archive (Strömberg, 2025a: 8). 

Its Own Organization 

During the early 2020s, it became evident that the archive had outgrown its place as a “mere” project within the Swedish Comics Association, and, in 2022, we started a new, separate organization for the archive. I am its first president, and Jakob Hallin and Thomas Storn are members of the new board of directors; Hallin is the manager of the new organization. To depart from the Swedish Comics Association was not an easy decision, but the right one. The archive had grown exponentially and was now a major part of the association’s activities, at the same time as the new board of directors that had taken over after I’ve made my departure as president in order to finish my PhD, were more interested in organizing other activities in the name of the association (Strömberg, 2025a: 8).

Since then, the archive has grown, getting large donations almost weekly. We today rent 1,150 shelf meters in the City Archive of Malmö, but that space is not nearly enough to accept what we have received the last couple of years, which is in various stages of being sorted, registered, and digitized. As the shelf space in the Malmö Archive is rapidly running out, we are right now looking into once again renting additional shelf space at Arkivcentrum Syd in Lund. We are, at the same time, in talks with the city of Malmö for long-term expansions of the archival facilities. 

The Executive Manager of the Archive, Jakob Hallin, at his desk.

The efficiency regarding registering and digitizing the material has been strengthened in the last couple of years. In 2024, we registered 27,490 donated publications, increasing the total of registered donated publications since the start to 151,872. An estimated 90,000 publications awaited being sorted and registered at end of the year. Of the 27,490 registered publications, 7,196 were new additions to the collections, moving us closer to owning a copy of everything comics-related ever published in Sweden. During the same year, we managed to digitize 13,138 covers and interior pages (Strömberg, 2025: 11–12). 

Assistant Simon Wennberg registering donated comics albums.

 This is all managed by the executive manager, who has five part-time assistants and about 15 additional people helping out. Together, they are manning six administrative rooms, as well as one major room for accepting and initial sorting of more expansive donations, as well as one storage room for discarded copies. A lot of the work done involves moving the materials between these rooms, depending on where in the process it is, before it ends up in the actual archival vaults. There are four, soon to be five, workspaces for digitization, focusing on different kinds of media, as well as ten workplaces for registering and eight more for sorting and handling of everything that is being donated.

Financing 

 

 

Every ten years, the journal Bild & Bubbla has had an issue dedicated to celebrating Swedish comics history, coinciding with the start of the archive in 2003, the tenth anniversary in 2013 and the 20th century in 2023.

 

A lot of factors have been set against the existence of a dedicated comics archive in Sweden, not the least, the earlier-mentioned historical disregard for comics as something deserving to be preserved in archives and museums. More recently, the work to establish The Comics Archive has been met with a reluctance to finance a new archive, as these institutions are all competing for a shrinking amount of governmental financing in Sweden, at the same time as comics publishers are facing drops in sales, making them less likely to sponsor an archival endeavor.

However, a lot of factors have also worked for the establishing of the archive. First and foremost is that a lot of people have been willing to work tirelessly and without pay for years and years, decades in fact. The amount of time that people such as Jakob Hallin, Peter Nilsson, Claes Reimerthi, Thomas Storn, myself, and many more have put in on all levels of the building of the archive can’t be overestimated and has also often come at a cost of lost income for the people involved.

That Thomas Storn is a professional archivist has been extremely important, meaning that the archive from the start was organized professionally. It also meant that we had connections within the archival world. Without these facts, it would probably have been difficult to get our archive into the official archives that it has resided in.

The collections of the Archive are kept in the facilities of the Malmö City Archive, ensuring the correct temperature and humidity for preservation.

 

Second, that the Swedish Comics Association already existed, since 1968, meant there was a safe harbor for the initial phase of the archive. The association had a solid reputation among potential financiers; an established system for handling day-to-day administrative tasks, such as applying for grants, sending reports, paying salaries, taxes and so on, and a large group of dedicated members from which to recruit people to work with the archive once it was founded. The association also had a journal, which throughout the years has worked as a publishing platform for disseminating information from the archive’s collections, including three thematic issues that have been produced every ten years, commemorating the start of the archive, as well as its 10^th and 20^th anniversaries.

The association was where people, such as Jakob Hallin and myself, cut our teeth at applying for grants, managing projects, producing books and exhibitions, and leading and organizing an NGO.

Third, even though it has sometimes been difficult, the archive was started in a country with a well-established system of governmental and private grants for supporting cultural endeavors. Throughout the years we have applied for and received different grants, from financing specific technologies used in, for instance, digitization, to funding the production of books and/or exhibitions. Since we became our own organization, we have also been able to get a substantial governmental grant every year for the digitization that we do as part of a national undertaking to digitize as much as possible of the Swedish national heritage.

We have a system in Sweden of supporting people who, for various reasons, have ended up outside of the traditional workforce, giving people often with physical and/or mental problems the opportunity to do what is labelled as “work training” with designated organizers. We have been doing this for well over a decade and usually have between four and 20 people organizing, registering, and digitizing the material in the archive. We get governmental money each day a person is work training at the archive, so this system both helps in the Sisyphean work of handling the material and finances the archive. Some of the people that have work trained have later been employed as assistants at the archive, and for this, the government pays a substantial part of their salaries, making it possible to have more assistants than we would otherwise be able to. 

At the Archive we have several workstations for digitizing different kinds of material.

 

Finally, we have been able to get considerable donations from a comics artist and publisher who wants to support what we do. This has sometimes amounted to more than what we’ve gotten from governmental grants and has been indispensable, especially in the pivotal years after we broke free from the Swedish Comics Association. We are, at the moment, in talks with another potential patron and hope to extend this part of the financing of the archive.

Furthermore, we plan to start selling copies of comic books and graphic novels that are not in the better condition of the ones we’ve been given through donations. We’ve been sorting these by year and have a huge storage of them, but have not had the time to build a system for handling this more commercial part of the archive. 

The Future 

When we started the archive in 2003, a lot of people seemed skeptical as to the actual use of such an endeavor and/or were disinterested in it. That has changed, and today, there is a growing interest in the preservation of comics history. I hope this article can be an inspiration for starting new comics archives as they are sorely needed, and that we will see comics archives getting more and more connected in the coming years, sharing knowledge and building a connected safety net for the preservation of comics history. 

 

 

Fredrik Strömberg is a Swedish researcher, journalist, and author. He is chief editor of Bild & Bubbla, the world’s second oldest magazine about comics, and president of The Comics Archive in Malmö Among the books he has written are Swedish Comics History, Black Images in the Comics, The Comics Go to Hell, Jewish Images in the Comics, and Comic Art Propaganda. Strömberg’s thesis, Comics and the Middle East -- Representation, Accommodation, Integration, was defended at Malmö University in 2022. 

References 

 

Didring Leksell, Karin. 2023. “Porträtt: Thomas Storn.” Bild & Bubbla. 55(3): 24–25.

Granberg, Ulf. 2016. “Förord.” In Svensk Seriehistoria -- andra boken från Svenskt Seriearkiv, edited by Ulf Granberg, pp. 6–8. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.  

Mani, Jamil. ed. 2014. Seriefrämjandets verksamhetsberättelse 2013. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

MUCH. 2022. “The Comics Archive Symposium 2022 – Abstracts.” https://comics.uni.mau.se/the-comics-archive-symposium-2022-abstracts. Accessed January 4, 2026.

Nilsson, Peter. 2002. Seriefrämjandets verksamhetsberättelse 2001. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Nilsson, Peter. 2003. Seriefrämjandets verksamhetsberättelse 2002. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Nilsson, Peter. 2004. Seriefrämjandets verksamhetsberättelse 2003. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Nilsson, Peter and Thomas Storn. 2003a. “Svensk seriehistoria.” Bild & Bubbla. 35(3): 24–25.

Nilsson, Peter and Thomas Storn. 2003b. “Vita fläckar och svarta hål -- Nu lägger vi pussel med svensk seriehistoria.” Bild & Bubbla. 35(3): 5–13.

Nordström, Nicklas. 2025. “Seriearkivet digitaliserar svensk seriehistoira.” Magasin K. magasink.se/2025/08/seriearkivet-digitaliserar-svensk-seriehistoria. Accessed January 2, 2026.

Storn, Thomas. 2005. “Svenskt Seriearkiv -- Svensk Seriehistoria 2003–2004”. In Svensk Seriehistoria -- första boken om Svenskt Seriearkiv, edited by Thomas Storn, pp. 188–201. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Storn, Thomas 2013a. “Förord.” In Svenskt Seriearkiv -- trycksaker, original och mer, edited by Fredrik Strömberg, p. 3. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Storn, Thomas. 2013b. “Svenskt Seriearkiv -- serieoriginal, trycksaker och mer.” Bild & Bubbla. 45(3): 63–86.

Storn, Thomas. 2020. “Om Svenskt Seriarkiv.” In Svensk Seriehistoria -- fjärde boken från Svenskt Seriearkiv, edited by Ulf Granberg, pp. 293–294. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Strömberg, Fredrik. 2010. Swedish Comics History. Malmö: The Swedish Comics Association.

Strömberg, Fredrik. 2013. “Seriearkivet 10 år!” Bild & Bubbla. 45(3): 7.

Strömberg, Fredrik. 2023. “Seriearkivet 20 år! -- ny organisation, ny framtid.” Bild & Bubbla. 55(3): 26–41.

Strömberg, Fredrik. 2025a. “Ett omvälvande år -- verksamhetsberättelse för Seriearkivet 2023.” In Seriearkivets årsbok 2023, edited by Fredrik Strömberg, pp. 8–15. Malmö: Seriearkivet.

Strömberg, Fredrik. 2025B. “Expansion och konsolidering -- verksamhetsberättelse för Seriearkivet 2024”. In Seriearkivets årsbok 2024, edited by Strömberg Fredrik, pp. 8–17. Malmö: Seriearkivet.

Zimmerman, Jesper. 2013. “Svenskt Seriearkiv 10 år -- var vi står idag och vart vi är på väg.” Bild & Bubbla. 45(3): 52–61.

 Editor's note - this essay was accepted for IJOCA 27-2, and edited by John A. Lent (JAL) and Mu Lin.  Updated 10/4/2026 with additional photographs. Updated 10/5/2026 to correct the final paragraph.