Graphic novel recommendation: What Will Be, Will Be by Lê Phan

A recommendation by Quynh Than, Association of Asian Comics Critics Asia (ACCA)

Phan, Lê. What will be, will be. Ho Chi Minh City,  Vietnam: Du But Books, 2025.

Quynh Than is the co-founder and editor of Du But Books in Ho Chi Minh City and the publisher of this book.

 What will be, will be is a graphic memoir by Vietnamese comic artist Lê Phan. At 176 pages, divided into eight chapters, the book follows his journey from a child first discovering what it means to be an artist, to an adult navigating the uncertainties, disappointments, and hard-won lessons of a creative life. Each chapter is inspired by a well-known song and marks a different emotional stage in his path toward becoming a professional comic artist.

 For readers unfamiliar with Lê Phan, he is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Vietnamese comics. In a local comics scene often shaped by manga-influenced aesthetics, he has long pursued a different visual and narrative path. That difference may have placed him somewhat outside the mainstream at times, but it has also allowed him to build a loyal readership entirely on his own terms. What makes his body of work especially compelling is his refusal to stay still. From mystery and dystopian storytelling to travel writing, childhood memory, and comic strips about life, love, and the strange comedy of being human, each of his books feels like a reinvention. It is almost as if every new project tries to undo the image created by the previous one. In What will be, will be, that process leads him to his most personal form yet: a storyteller willing to turn fully toward himself.

 In terms of plot, What will be, will be does not rely on dramatic twists. Instead, it draws readers in through the truthful rhythm of a life shaped by art. The first half carries the lightness of childhood: mischief, wonder, and the first sparks of obsession with drawing. The second half moves into more difficult territory, as dreams collide with reality and artistic passion is tested by confusion, failure, loneliness, and emotional exhaustion. What emerges is not simply the story of one cartoonist’s career, but the story of someone learning, repeatedly, how to lose himself and find his way back.

What makes the book especially interesting is that it works on several levels at once. It is an autobiography, certainly, but also a meditation on what it means to choose a creative life when it is a choice that rarely stable or well understood. At the same time, it serves as an informal cultural record of a generation of Vietnamese artists who grew up with manga, copied comics by hand, made homemade books, and searched for creative communities through magazines, forums, and small circles of fellow enthusiasts. In that sense, the book is both deeply personal and historical.

 Another strength lies in the contrast between style and subject. Lê Phan uses a simple, light, sometimes almost childlike drawing style to tell a story filled with self-doubt, reflection, hurt, and healing. The effect is powerful. The softness of the artwork makes the emotional honesty of the book hit even harder, without ever becoming melodramatic. Comics here are not just a delivery system for memoir, but the most natural language for memory itself: elastic, playful, fragmented, and emotionally precise.

 This is a book that deserves to be read because it is sincere without asking for pity, and thoughtful without ever becoming heavy-handed. For readers interested in comics, it widens the horizon of what Vietnamese comics can hold. For artists and aspiring creators, it offers not instruction so much as companionship and reassurance that doubt, detours, and even brokenness can become part of one’s language. What will be, will be is a gentle reminder that becoming oneself is rarely a straight road. Sometimes we must lose our way before we can recognize the shape of our own heart. Sometimes we must - as Phan wrote in the book - "gather our scattered pieces, one by one, and trust that they still belong to us". Lê Phan tells that journey with tenderness, humility, and grace, and proves that even the most uncertain path can, in time, lead us back to who we are.

Images from the book can be seen in the review at https://vietcetera.com/vn/gui-nhung-trai-tim-can-dam-dang-theo-duoi-dam-me

Graphic Novel Review: Remember Us to Life. A Graphic Memoir

reviewed by Ishita Sehgal, IU Bloomington 

Joanna Rubin Dranger. Remember Us to Life. A Graphic Memoir. Berkeley, CA:  Ten Speed Press, 2025. 432 pp. US $40.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:  978-0-5938-3690-3. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/769055/remember-us-to-life-by-joanna-rubin-dranger/

  

 

 

Remember Us to Life is an amalgamation of the history of the Holocaust and the lived experiences of Jews. Originally published in Swedish, the story follows the history of Dranger’s extended family, focusing on her grandparents, who lost family members to the concentration camps in Germany and Norway. The medium she uses to represent these stories applies the aid of a monochrome, black and white narrative, which is supported by the scattered use of color. The color is visible, when she uses original photographs, old handwritten memorabilia, and documents to emphasize the harrowing memories.

Throughout the book, Dranger is searching for a past that seems to be lost, or as she realizes, is too painful to remember. Her art shines through the story as her frameless pages, which intermingle with the stories, memories, and narratives, bring together the thematic of the memoir. She jumps between the present and the past, but, at the same time, she puts herself in the position of the survivors and imagines how different the experience would be. The story she narrates is specific to her family, but the way she presents it, is a story of every Jew during the years between 1935-1945. Her approach is multi-faceted, with the use of graphic illustrations, family photographs, and painting. Dranger attempts to construct the history of the lost family, but keeps her Swedish positionality as the focal point. Through the course of the memoir, she is seen critiquing Sweden’s role during World War II. The title itself envelopes the theme of the memoir, which is to never forget any of the lives that were lost during the Holocaust and to remember the atrocities vetted out on them.

Winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2023, Remember Us to Life became the first graphic novel to receive this honor, exemplifying the strength of graphic storytelling. Dranger’s genre-defining memoir highlights the silences of the Holocaust through the family’s lens. The memoir uncovers the narratives of her extended family, who moved or escaped to different parts of the world, and the connections they had with their familial roots. This book becomes a beacon of light through the collective amnesia about the Holocaust and the loss of family. Her strong personal research, her attempt to find out long-lost relatives, is not just for writing her memoir, but is also about giving the deceased family members a name and making sure they are never forgotten.

 

Graphic Novel Review: Heartcore by Štěpánka Jislová

 Štěpánka Jislová, translated by Martha Kuhlman.  Heartcore. Graphic Mundi, 2025. https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-090-8.html

reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

 

While reading Štěpánka Jislová’s extraordinary graphic memoir Heartcore, which deals exhaustively with her love life’s travails, more than once I was reminded of this passage from an early-2000s Laura Kipnis polemic against love:

 

Love is, as we know, a mysterious and controlling force. It has vast power over our thoughts

and life decisions. It demands our loyalty, and we, in turn, freely comply. Saying no to love

isn’t simply heresy; it is tragedy
— the failure to achieve what is most essentially human. So

deeply internalized is our obedience to this most capricious despot that artists create

passionate odes to its cruelty, and audiences seem never to tire of the most deeply unoriginal

mass spectacles devoted to rehearsing the litany of its torments, fixating their very beings on

the narrowest glimmer of its fleeting satisfactions (“Love”).[i]

 

Indeed, Heartcore is an intense, sobering, and at times hilarious deep dive into 21^st-century love and relationships — or at least into a lot of things that people call love and relationships. And this is key: an irreducible ambiguity lies at the heart of Heartcore’s subject. As the author’s avatar informs us in a prologue: “This is a love story.” On the next page, though, she amends the line so that it reads, “This is a love break-up story.”

That clears things up.

Jislová, who graduated from the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in Plzeň, has built a strong reputation in Czech comics over the last fifteen years. Apart from contributing art to serious historical projects like The Czechs (Češi, 2013-2016, written by Pavel Kosatík) and the graphic biography Milada Horáková (2020, written by Zdeněk Ležák), she also does decent superhero satire, as seen in her scripts for Supro: Heroes on Credit (Hrdinové na dluh, 2023, art by Viktor Svoboda). She won the Muriel Award (the Czech comics industry’s highest prize), for her art on the graphic memoir Bald (Bez Vlasů, 2021; English translation 2024), a collaboration with writer Tereza Čechová.[ii] Two years later she released Heartcore (Srdcovka, 2023; English translation 2025), widely regarded as the first full-length single-author Czech comics memoir. It won that year’s Muriel for best comics work.

Graphic memoir has existed for quite a while in Western Europe, Japan and the US but has only recently emerged in the Czech comics scene.[iii] As we know, comics has a deep well of resources for the practice of putting oneself down on paper in words and (perhaps more critically) pictures — what Gillian Whitlock and others term autographics:  

 

The signature of autobiography is transformed in autographics’ touch on the page, and

memoir makes demands that draw deeply on the provenance of the comics in return. Here,

autobiography escapes the rigid confines of truth, authenticity and a singular coherent subject

and discovers the potential of comics’ multimodal visual/verbal pyrotechnics to transform

self-representation (238).

 

Jislová, who grew up with comics, clearly grasps their potential for authorial self-examination; she produces an at times startling memoir on the vagaries of the heart and loins, one in its own way worthy of Aline Kominsky-Crumb or Phoebe Gloeckner — though she’s never as explicit. (Few are). Stylistically and thematically, this is more mainstream fare, but it’s also more wide-ranging than its illustrious predecessors; by the end she’s gone beyond her own vexed relationship issues to explore society itself’s enthrallment to Kipnis’ “most capricious despot.”

So, first and foremost, we should commend publisher Graphic Mundi and translator Martha Kuhlman for bringing to English-language readers such a groundbreaking work by a renowned creator from Central Europe. Such publications remain all too rare.[iv]  

That said, I want to put on the table now my one objection to the approach utilized in this instance to transform Jislová’s Srdcovka (a Czech word denoting something near and dear to one’s heart which one recognizes as somehow flawed) into Heartcore. Kuhlman’s strong and supple translation, presumably in a bid to “de-exoticize” the original for non-Czech readers, anglicizes most of the characters’ names such that Štěpánka (pronounced SHTYE-pan-ka) becomes “Stephanie” and Michal (pronounced MEE-khal) becomes “Mike,” etc.[v] Put me down as one against such “localization” of foreign language literary texts in the name of familiarity.

Decisions like this, I realize, often do not fall to translators, but to presses wary of weird foreign names spooking away target readers. This strategy tends to backfire, though, when famous people are mentioned in the text. I would imagine it’s jolting to anglophone readers, after 150 pages of “Stephanie” and “Mike,” to see actual Czech names like Bohumil Kulínský (choirmaster turned child rapist), Eliška Stěpánová (proFem researcher) and Václav Havel (playwright/former Czech president). Reasonable people can disagree on this question, but in an ever-homogenizing, Western cultural imperialist world where the peculiar and local too often get retouched into whatever goes down easiest in the target market, I remain an adherent of comics scholar Kate Kelp-Stebbins’ mantra to “read for difference,” not sameness, when we engage with comic art far from our shores.

Sermon over.

In terms of its plot, Heartcore proceeds as a fairly standard memoir, one exceedingly focused on getting some. “I must find a boyfriend,” says Štěpánka (sorry, I will be using these people’s real names) (25). We follow our heroine through her middle-class upbringing in the post-communist Czech Republic. I was quite taken with a double-page spread of the neighborhood where she grew up, which many Central/Eastern Europeans will recognize as the legacy of Soviet-era planned economy housing policies: dilapidated concrete structures, a blocky quasi-brutalist health clinic, what the Czechs call paneláky (tall prefab apartment complexes), a Julius Meinl supermarket and a run-down derelict which Jislová labels “???” (26-27).

From an early age, Štěpánka gloms onto two things in a big way: popular culture (including comics and anime) and the stringently policed gender roles she comes to understand everyone must embrace. For example, she loves larping (live-action role-playing) and does it well, but a group of boys forbid her from playing with them when they realize she’s a girl (21). Even her beloved fantasy settings are not immune to the real world’s arbitrary rules. In fact, she ultimately realizes that these immersive fictional worlds were teaching her all along “what a love relationship is” (Aragorn and Arwen), “what best friends are like” (the Czech series Fast Arrows),[vi] “what a group of friends is like” (the Harry Potter series) (195).

But when it comes to relationships, life ain’t Lord of the Rings. For Štěpánka love and desire become hopelessly entangled with status (something she also obsesses over), with FOMO, with a fiction-fueled quasi-performative suffering. “Having a crush is terrible but not having a crush is terribly boring,” she writes in her sketch journal (55). This becomes the grand theme of our heroine’s life, all through art school, problems with alcohol abuse and beyond. It has closely proscribed limits, but Jislová’s professed honesty is unflinching. She doesn’t shy from presenting her young self as vain, shallow, prone to judging others, and selecting partners mostly based on how well they will prop up her self-image. All this leads to the excruciating on-again/off-again purgatory existence of life with Michal, the attractive guy who refuses to commit, the one who after sleeping with her provides enough of an ego-boost for her to think, “I guess I’m not that ugly after all” (65).[vii] The one who over and over breaks her heart because he’s not in touch with his own feelings. The one who leads her on for years. “If I can’t have a boyfriend,” she muses, “he’s the next best thing” (77).    

Fig 2. ‘How Does Anxiety Attachment Arise?’ 

From the didactic portion of Heartcore.

 

The repeated disasters that ensue eventually lead to Heartcore’s most remarkable narrative strategies. Pushing at what we usually mean by “memoir,” for a chapter Jislová radically switches perspective to that of Michal himself (echoing the structure of Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying [2007]).[viii]

Then she abandons conventional narrative altogether, turning to a didactic section exploring Attachment Theory, in which she uses material from her own life and her many tools as a cartoonist to make the tutorial come alive. This portion most resembles Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), though it’s a lot less wordy and has a lot more pop psychology. While some might find the shift jarring, Jislová insisted to me in interview that she wanted her readers to come away with something more than just her own individual story; she wanted to teach them something so they could connect the dots in their own lives. “[I]f I hadn’t put it in there, I would feel like it’s incomplete, like I had planted the seed, but never showed the flower,” she told me. One gets the sense, achingly, that in these concluding sections the author is trying to penetrate as deeply as possible into the mysteries that have brought her where she is – where we all are – to gain some measure of self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-love.

Heartcore left this reader with many stimulating impressions and associations. Here are some of them.

Women navigating a patriarchal world they never made is a lot like a horror movie; it’s basically Men (d. Alex Garland, 2022), the Jesse Buckley-starring feminist version of Get Out (d. Jordan Peele, 2017).

Similarly, some people are terrified of not being in a relationship, of being alone with their own selves and thoughts. They really should ask themselves why.  

Both social convention and instinct fuel love mania. As the droning teacher in the Ukrainian high school drama Stop-Zemlia (d. Kateryna Gornostai, 2021) puts it: “If we take a look at the processes in the brain of a person in love, modern science says it can be compared to a stress reaction. But only at the beginning. In this case, the biggest changes occur in the subcortical structures, which are referred to as reward centers.” Later on she says, “Enough about love, let’s get back to reality.” Exactly.

Social media has by now utterly warped multiple generations’ views of love, dating, desire, the whole shebang. It has normalized cyberstalking, encouraged people to treat each other as disposable objects, made the already fraught processes of finding companionship even more cringe-worthy and fatally banal. I’m hardly the first to say this. Štěpánka in one scene tells a guy there won’t be a second date — by e-mail as she’s walking away from him (72). The internet makes cowards of us all. It’d be funnier if it weren’t so tragic. This is what Kant warned us about, centuries before the first dating app: don’t use each other as means to ends. You’ll be sorry.   

Our romantic preferences come from all over the map; an inscrutable mishmash of random experiences and things we saw on TV at an impressionable age. In Jislová’s case, it was men with long hair, comics, John Malkovich, fantasy media, manga, anime, teen mags (“What turns him on the most?”), internet porn, Erich Fromm. It’s a wonder anyone at all survives into adulthood with a well-adjusted attitude.

Modern coupling is subsumed under a vicious economy of status, whereby you sleep with someone more than anything else to uphold your own self-worth and then brag-text to your friends about it. “I lost interest in that guy almost immediately,” our heroine muses on the tram ride home. “My idea of relationships didn’t go beyond what had just happened. The only thing that made me happy was reaching a new milestone. Mission accomplished” (39).  

Self-aware to a fault, the author of Heartcore also does a great job of skewering the transparent motives of others. Hilariously so. A clingy, whiny date follows her home and into her bed; she almost gives in out of pure irritation (74). It’s disturbing, pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny – Kominsky-Crumb for the 21^st century.[ix] A familiar brand of insipid metrosexual male comes for special abuse: “They’re all feminists until a woman says no” (99).

Fig 4. ‘I am so lonely.’

The tone at times borders on apocalyptic: “I can’t connect with others. I feel like a stranger even to myself. The whole time with Michal, I thought I was happy. Because to be in love means to be happy. But the reality is that our entire relationship was torture” (200). Štěpánka broods on these thoughts while walking in a dark wood midway through her life, like Dante’s traveler. But the lines themselves could almost have come from Kipnis.

The foregoing would make Jislová a talented memoirist – but what makes Heartcore a terrific graphic memoir is her excellent cartooning. I’ve had some reservations about her rendering in the past,[x] but here she loosens her style, making it more flexible and subtle, especially in facial expressions. At the same time, the “mask-like” cartoony visages convey her heroine’s problems with authentic expression, as Jislová told an interviewer (Fraňková). Somewhat reminiscent of Dave Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp (2009), her drawings also reflect the influence of Georgia Webber, Kate Beaton, Ellen Forney and Tillie Walden, among others.

She makes another wise choice with the color scheme: exclusively blue, red and their various shades. “By using two colors you can emphasize emotions, you can emphasize certain panels and in that way you can explain things very efficiently, in my opinion, precisely because you have a very limited set of tools” she said in the same interview (Fraňková). Plus, of course, there’s the gendered heteronormative connotations of those two colors. The image of Štěpánka isolated, alone and maybe a little horny at a crowded party (as seen on the book’s cover) comes across all the more boldly through those color contrasts. The red along with the shape and placement of her figure suggest a heart, too (“srdcovka” is derived from “srdce,” or heart).

Fig 3. Štěpánka’s world falls apart.

Jislová’s cartooning shines brightest in her rendering of charged and traumatic emotional states. When Michal rejects Štěpánka’s overtures for commitment (not for the first or last time), her world literally shatters. We see her sitting in a café, stolid, tears welling up, the only color the red of her hair and blouse (plus a few incidental patches). From one panel to the next, the hueless background (café patrons and all) collapses into fragments, like glass (124). This “fractured” composition recalls Winsor McCay’s famous Little Sammy Sneeze of September 24, 1905, in which the tyke destroys his own panel borders with another epic sternutation. But here no one is laughing. 

Fig 5. Štěpánka at different ages, all 

rationalizing her late father’s emotional distance.

 

Another page design shows six successive full-body images of Štěpánka as she progressively falls on her knees against the giant light red words “I am so lonely” (76). Later, hearing of her father’s death by cell phone, she appears at four different ages, all in a row from adult to girlhood, making up the middle tier. At each “stage” she rationalizes her father’s lack of involvement in her life: “He loves me, even though he won’t spend time with me,” muses the child-Štěpánka (146). Many of these affectively heightened pages have no backgrounds, underscoring a void-like alienation/disorientation, be it of modern love, grief or family dysfunction.

The most powerful of these “minimalist,” negative space-heavy designs shows a full-page splash of Štěpánka and Michal in an odd “puzzle piece” configuration, touching fingertips but otherwise completely estranged: facing in opposite directions, upside down relative to each other, with empty expressions – a disturbing, deep-freeze portrait of intimacy (205). Love really can feel like an unsolvable puzzle sometimes.  

Fig 6. Štěpánka and Michal in the “puzzle piece” page.

Just as the author leaves it for the latter half of her memoir, so have I held off until now discussing Heartcore’s “Part Zero,” which details in harrowing (but not graphic) detail Jislová’s childhood sexual assault at a summer camp. The entire chapter is told almost entirely in bright, glaring red tones; it’s hard to read in more ways than one.

Here Jislová’s work bears comparisons to that of Katie Green’s Lighter Than my Shadow (2013), Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2015) and Megan Kelso’s “The Golden Lasso,” part of the collection Who Will Make the Pancakes? (2022). As Frederik Byrn Køhlert writes in reference to Phoebe Gloeckner’s oeuvre, the political act of showing hidden sexual abuse in comics form “not only make[s] the case for the potential of the form to serve a therapeutic purpose but also illustrate[s] the problem of adequately representing an autobiographical self that is both fragmented and under duress” (82-83). Štěpánka’s journey as a survivor more than validates that observation.   

Fig 7. An abstract composition from Heartcore’s 

‘Part Zero,’ on the author’s sexual abuse.

 

And while some readers might take this terrible incident as a sort of key to understanding her later relationship struggles, Jislová herself resists such blunt reductionism. That said, both the episode itself and perhaps more crucially, the unwillingness of so many in Štěpánka’s life to openly discuss it, certainly leaves scars. Her rapist’s infuriating rationalizations for his crime are no help; they’re also banal tripe oft-repeated by sexual abusers.[xi] But again, what makes Heartcore rise above other graphic memoirs dealing with sexual abuse is how Jislová eventually turns the focus away from her own individual story to discuss rape statistics and the rampant rape culture in the Czech Republic (e.g., the aforementioned Kulínský).  

She gains a measure of closure when, late in the book, the grown-up Štěpánka tears up a letter from her rapist (years later he’s still making excuses). The shredded paper flies off into the ether in a million little confetti pieces. “I don’t need someone to believe me,” she writes. “I was there” (207). I really like Kuhlman’s choices here; the literal Czech is something more like “I don’t need someone to believe me. I know that it happened.” The translator’s rendering is both better colloquial English and figuratively, hauntingly “takes us back” to the incident itself, even as Štěpánka shrugs its weight off her shoulders.

 It is a truth universally unacknowledged – especially around Valentine’s Day – that at the center of every love relationship is a power struggle; this is the thesis Kipnis returns to over and over in Against Love: A Polemic. Heartcore, while not a polemic, nonetheless dares to question the near-religious fervor which love and relationships (or at least what many people call love and relationships) inspires. The power issue rears its head here too, as when Štěpánka considers “every positive reaction” from Michal “a small victory” (86).

Fig 8. From the epilogue, in which Jislová 

discusses multigenerational trauma.

Once more, what I love about this memoir is how it repeatedly goes from our protagonist’s particular experience to the wide-angle view, how – despite what some might consider its overly pedantic tone – it overtly seeks to teach us something crucial about the world we’ve made for ourselves. The penultimate page of the epilogue really evinces that sense of mission, by expanding the scope to several generations and to all of present-day society. Three page-wide tiers show falling bullets (representing the lives of parents and grandparents touched by the world wars) and various kinds of debris (to underscore the lack of attention paid to mental health). This historical context is key, Jislová implies, to understanding modern interpersonal relations. Yet as she also then notes, “What is lacking – for both genders (but not always) – often takes on specifically gendered forms,” namely the lack of healthy anger for women and a lack of opportunity to express their full emotional spectrum for men (230). Both suffer for it – though of course there remain power imbalances to account for.

Here Jislová and the author of Against Love might agree: in our utter submission to that “most capricious despot,” we sometimes lose sight of the big picture.

“Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is,” Kipnis archly reminds (Against: 49).

In a world so besotted with relationship mania – where you’re either paired off or you’re a loser – what would we spend our time on otherwise, one might dare to wonder.

Heartcore certainly does.

  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Alaniz, José. Bald review. International Journal of Comic Art. Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2024): 516-523.

 Aviv, Rachel. “Alice Munroe’s Passive Voice.” The New Yorker (December 23, 2024). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice.

 Fraňková, Ruth. “Heartcore: Award-winning Graphic Novel Examines Modern-day Relationships.” Radio Prague International (March 12, 2024). https://english.radio.cz/heartcore-award-winning-graphic-novel-examines-modern-day-relationships-8811072.

 Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. Knopf Doubleday, 2003.

 —. “Love in the 21^st Century; Against Love.” The New York Times Magazine (October 14, 2001). https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/magazine/love-in-the-21st-century-against-love.html.

 Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. Rutgers UP, 2019.

 Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics.” Comics Studies: A Guidebook. Ed. Charles Hatfield & Bart Beaty. Rutgers UP, 2020: 227-240.

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[i] Kipnis later reworked this language for an early section of her 2003 book Against Love: A Polemic. That version reads: “Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions. Love is boss, and a demanding one, too: it demands our loyalty. We, in turn, freely comply — or as freely as the average subject in thrall to an all-powerful master, as freely as indentured servants. It’s a new form of mass conscription: meaning it’s out of the question to be summoned by love, issued your marching orders, and then decline to pledge body and being to the cause. There’s no way of being against love precisely because we moderns are constituted as beings yearning to be filled, craving connection, needing to adore and be adored, because love is vital plasma and everything else in the world just tap water. We prostrate ourselves at love’s portals, anxious for entry, like social strivers waiting at the ropeline outside some exclusive club hoping to gain admission to its plushy chambers, thereby confirming our essential worth and making us interesting to ourselves” (Against: 3). 

[ii] See Alaniz, “Bald.”

[iii] See my interview with Jislová elsewhere in this volume; we get into that. Also of note in the development of Czech autobio comics is Lucie Lomová’s Every Day is a New Day: A Comics Diary (Každý den je nový: komiksový deník, 2022).   

[iv] Kuhlman is the hardest working translator of Czech comics into English. She has previously translated Čechová/Jislová’s Bald and an excerpt from Džian Baban and Vojtěch Mašek’s monumental graphic novel series Fred Brunold’s Monstercabaret Presents (Monstrkabaret Freda Brunolda uvádí, 2004-2008), also known as the Damian Chobot trilogy; see here: https://www.shenandoahliterary.org/74-1-2/stop-making-sense-an-introduction-to-i/. Full disclosure: Kuhlman and I edited the collection Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (University of Leuven Press, 2020). She provided me with a copy of Heartcore for review.   

[v] This has been happening with translations of Slavic literature for a long time. Let’s take the case of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867) as sordidly illustrative. The celebrated early translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, done in consultation with the author, yields such ugly English/Russian chimeras as “Andrew Nikolayevich Bolkonski” and “Nicholas Ilyich Rostov.” Would it really have burdened anglophone readers so much to be exposed to the Russian names Andrei and Nikolai? They’re close enough to their English equivalents, aren’t they?

[vi] Fast Arrows (Rychlé Šipy) was a boy’s adventure comics series created by writer Jaroslav Foglar, first published in 1938. Several artists worked on it over the decades; the first was Jan Fischer.

[vii] Comics emphases in original.

[viii] The parallels with Pretending is Lying are stark, though Jislová’s portrait is more for mainstream consumption than Goblet’s expressionistic masterpiece. Like her Belgian predecessor, Jislová collaborated with Michal on his section (Fraňková), just as Goblet collaborated with her problematic partner Guy Marc Hinant for the chapters focalized on him. While we may not like these male partners any better after reading their portions, we maybe come to understand them better. In Heartcore one definitely gets a sense of how men from an early age are put into an emotional straightjacket by the same gender role ideology which besets our heroine. Incidentally, today Jislová is married to Michal (again, see my interview with her).    

[ix] Compare it, for example, to Kominsky-Crumb’s “The Young Bunch: An Unromantic Nonadventure Story” (Twisted Sisters #1, June, 1976). Closer geographically to Central/Eastern Europe, see also Russian cartoonist Alyona Kamyshevskaya’s graphic memoir My Sex (2014), which plays a ridiculously awkward date rape scene for giggles.

[x] See Alaniz, “Bald.” 

[xi] See for example the writer Alice Munroe’s partner, Gerald “Gerry” Fremlin, who molested her nine-year-old daughter. He justifies it by saying such revolting things as “I know there are Lolitas” (Aviv, emphasis in original).