Comics of the New Europe

A new generation of European cartoonists

Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences.

Contributors: Max Bledstein (University of Winnipeg), Dragana Obradović (University of Toronto), Aleksandra Sekulić (University of Arts in Belgrade), Pavel Kořínek (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague), Martin Foret (Palacký University), Michael Scholz (Uppsala University), Sean Eedy (Carleton University), Elizabeth Nijdam (University of British Columbia), Ewa Stańczyk (University of Amsterdam), Eszter Szép (Eötvös Loránd University)

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

In this video Martha Kuhlman discusses various aspects of the book ‘Comics of the New Europe’, focusing in particular on Czech authors.

General Introduction: Comics of the ‘New’ Europe Martha Kuhlman, José Alaniz

Part 1: The Former Yugoslav States

Un-Drawn Experience: Visualizing Trauma in Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia
Max Bledstein

Filial Estrangement and Figurative Mourning in the Work of Nina Bunjevac
Dragana Obradović

Reality Check Through the Historical Avant-garde: Danilo Milošev Wostok
Aleksandra Sekulić

Part 2: Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic

Facets of Nostalgia: Text-centric Longing in Comics and Graphic Novels by Pavel Čech
Pavel Kořínek

The Avant-Garde Aesthetic of Vojtěch Mašek
Martha Kuhlman

Regardless of Context: Graphic Novels with the Faceless (and Homelandless) Hero of Branko Jelinek
Martin Foret

Part 3: Germany

Co-Opting Childhood and Obscuring Ideology in Mosaik von Hannes Hegen, 1959-1974
Sean Eedy

Images of Spies and Counter Spies in East German Comics
Michael F. Scholz

Towards a Graphic Historicity: Authenticity and Photography in the German Graphic Novel
Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam

Part 4: Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary

Women, Feminism and Polish Comic Books: Frąś/Hagedorn’s Totalnie nie nostalgia
Ewa Stańczyk

Igor Baranko and National Precarity in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Comics
José Alaniz

The Autobiographical Mode in Post-Communist Romanian Comics:

Everyday Life in Brynjar Åbel Bandlien’s Strîmb Living and Andreea Chirică’s The Year of the Pioneer
Mihaela Precup

Avatars and Iteration in Contemporary Hungarian Autobiographical Comics
Eszter Szép

Acknowledgments

About the authors

Index

Martha Kuhlman

Martha Kuhlman is professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University.

José Alaniz

José Alaniz is professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.