Posts filed under 'comic art'

In Spite Of It All: On Czech Comics with Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš

"Comics" . . . as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving.

After decades of being dismissed as trash or a genre suitable only for children, comic books and graphic novels have begun to gain recognition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, becoming the subject of serious scholarly interest and major retrospective exhibitions. Comic art now has an established infrastructure, with an annual prize, the Muriel Award, a Centre for Comics Studies (at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc), and an international comic art festival, Frame, in Prague. In the second of our interviews on comic art, Asymptote’s editor-at-large Julia Sherwood asked two of the Centre’s associates and noted experts Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš to introduce our readers to this art form and its leading Czech and Slovak proponents.

Julia Sherwood (JS): You and your colleagues have written widely on all aspects of comic art, from reviews to historical and theoretical articles and essays, including V panelech a bublinách (In Panels and Speech Balloons), published in 2015, the first detailed Czech work that summarizes the various theories and concepts around comic art, which you co-authored with Martin Foret. So to begin with, how would you define the genre? 

Pavel Kořínek (PK): The million-dollar question, and straight off, too. There are, of course, many definitions of comics, and new ones are being added all the time. We can revel in Scott McCloud’s definition of comic art as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”; we can talk about sequentiality and the dominance of the sequential image primarily in the context of print media; we can reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is nothing that can be defined as being specific exclusively to comics; and we can talk about comics as whatever we (or, ideally, some higher institutional authority, by consensus) declare to be comics. After all, we all sort of subconsciously know “what a comic is” (we just don’t know if it’s actually a genre—and in what sense—a medium, a form, or what). It’s only when we look more closely that we begin to encounter more complicated cases: works that may be related to comics, for example, but don’t quite seamlessly fulfill our ideas of what comics are. In our book, we ended up approaching the question of definition as an open-ended challenge: we offered several influential approaches and tried to convey to the reader our conviction that “comics”—while being aware of all that has been said formally and functionally, socially and institutionally—as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving rather than a fixed category. Fortunately. Otherwise, it would have been a staggering bore.

JS: Your monumental Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století (History of Czechoslovak Comics in the 20th Century, co-authored with Martin Foret and Tomáš Prokůpek), published in 2014, details across almost one thousand lavishly illustrated pages on how the turbulent history of Europe over the past century has affected the development of the genre. Difficult as this task may be, could you outline the main stages and how they were shaped by the political events from the early days until World War; under the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, during World War II; under communism; and after its fall?

Michal Jareš (MJ): Talking about something that is new and still evolving, such as a “possible” history of Czechoslovak comics, we also have to bear in mind the history of Central Europe as a whole, particularly in our neck of the woods, from the time of Austria-Hungary to the foundation (and later dissolution) of Czechoslovakia. We also have to consider it within the context of the debates and trends that shaped all of twentieth-century art, including the avant-garde. We constantly encounter attempts to understand comics as well as attempts to forbid them, and attempts at innovation as well as attempts to stay within the educational form of comics. So, at the very beginning we can see a clear continuation of the tradition of Central European caricature and thus topics aimed at the adult reader as well. The development of magazines for children and youth spawned a variety of children’s comics featuring humorous animals (such as the children’s magazine Punťa).  READ MORE…

“Queen of the Czech Comic”: An Interview with Lucie Lomová

To what extent are we shaped by the society we live in? How far are we willing to swim against the current?

In the first of two interviews on the thriving Czech comic art scene for the Asymptote blog, we introduce Lucie Lomová, artist, writer, and author of numerous comic books for both children and adults. Comic art and graphic novels are increasingly gaining recognition as a serious art and literary form; since the start of the millenium, the Czech Republic has seen a boom in the genre. In the second interview, two Czech literature scholars will paint a more comprehensive picture of the scene for Asymptote readers. Dubbed “the queen of the Czech comic,” Lomová is the best-known woman comic book author of the new, postcommunist generation, with three coveted Muriel Awards, including two—for original script and best original Czech comic—for her graphic novel, Divoši (Savages) to be published in English translation by Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, and Peter Sherwood. We are delighted to introduce Lucie Lomová to Asymptote’s readers through this interview, conducted by Julia over email.

JS: You are a graduate of the Theatre faculty at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), but you switched to writing and drawing comics in the early 1990s. In those days, this kind of career change required quite a lot of courage—you said in an interview: “To choose comics as one’s profession was rather like trying to make a living by catching earthworms.” What motivated you to take the risk? 

LL: Did I really say that? Perhaps I wouldn’t use that comparison now, but it‘s true that in those days comic art was a totally marginal and underrated genre, with publication opportunities few and far between. But, it didn’t really require any special courage on my part. The year of the Velvet Revolution, 1989—a turning point in every respect for everyone—saw the publication of my first comic strip about Anča and Pepík, a couple of mice kids. My sister Ivana and I had worked on it together for three years, writing the story and doing the drawings. I had just graduated in dramaturgy and started working in a theatre in Šumperk, a small town about 200 kilometres east of Prague. When the Velvet Revolution came, I decided to return to Prague, although I didn’t really have a clear idea about what I was going to do. I wrote art reviews for newspapers, drew cartoons, and pondered what I should apply myself to in all this new freedom—just then, the children’s comic journal Čtyřlístek (The Four-Leaved Clover) invited me to write and draw more stories about Anča and Pepík for them, this time on my own, as my sister had moved on to other things. In the summer of 1990, I hitchhiked to Greece with my boyfriend. We were penniless, but overjoyed and excited about all the possibilities that had opened up before us. I remember that it was during the long rides in strangers’ cars that the ideas for the first three stories came to me, and once I was back home, I got drawing. For the following ten years, drawing comics for Čtyřlístek was my bread and butter.

Anca&PepikIlu02

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