Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Comics of the New Europe

Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Comics of the New Europe Reflections and Intersections Edited by Martha Kuhlman & José Alaniz LEUVEN UNIVERSITY PRESS Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 © 2020 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Universitaire Pers Leuven Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated data file or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers. ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 D/2020/1869/6 NUR: 617 Layout: Frederik Danko Cover design: Johan Van Looveren Cover illustration: Map by Martha Kuhlman in collaboration with the volume contributors, 2019. Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Contents General Introduction: Comics of the 'New' Europe 7 Martha Kuhlman, José Alaniz Part 1: The Former Yugoslav States 25 Un-Drawn Experience: Visualizing Trauma in Aleksandar Zograf’s 31 Regards from Serbia Max Bledstein Filial Estrangement and Figurative Mourning in the Work of Nina Bunjevac 47 Dragana Obradović Reality Check Through the Historical Avant-garde: Danilo Milošev Wostok 67 Aleksandra Sekulić Part 2: Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic 83 Facets of Nostalgia: Text-centric Longing in Comics and Graphic Novels 89 by Pavel Čech Pavel Kořínek The Avant-Garde Aesthetic of Vojtěch Mašek 105 Martha Kuhlman Regardless of Context: Graphic Novels with the Faceless (and Homelandless) 121 Hero of Branko Jelinek Martin Foret Part 3: Germany 137 Co-Opting Childhood and Obscuring Ideology in Mosaik von Hannes Hegen, 143 1959-1974 Sean Eedy Images of Spies and Counter Spies in East German Comics 159 Michael F. Scholz Towards a Graphic Historicity: Authenticity and Photography in the 177 German Graphic Novel Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Contents Part 4: Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary 199 Women, Feminism and Polish Comic Books: Frąś/Hagedorn’s 201 Totalnie nie nostalgia Ewa Stańczyk Igor Baranko and National Precarity in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Comics 215 José Alaniz The Autobiographical Mode in Post-Communist Romanian Comics: 239 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 261 Eszter Szép Acknowledgments 277 About the authors 279 Index 283 Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Max Bledstein Un-Drawn Experience: Visualizing Trauma in Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia he autobiographical comics of Aleksandar Zograf, collected in the anthology TRegards from Serbia (2007), depict life in Serbia from the beginning of the Croatian War of Independence to the aftermath of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Zograf represents his experiences in part through surrealist images, metatextual references to other works of cartooning, and depictions of characters’ views of the world around them.1 These methods of illustration reflect the trauma of Zograf’s past: just as Cathy Caruth argues in her landmark book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and His- tory that questions regarding trauma “can never be asked in a straightforward way but must, indeed, also be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary,” the levels of mediation in Zograf’s comics reflect the challenges posed by more straightforward depictions of traumatic experience (5). Although Zograf’s representation of wartime Serbia is, in fact, quite the opposite of being un-drawn, he couches his memoirs in illustrative layers facilitating the artistic rendering of the horrors of Serbian life in the nineties. Picking up from Caruth, theorists of trauma and literature such as Eugene L. Arva and Michael Rothberg argue that ignoring the standards of realism can help authors and artists to depict their traumatic experiences. Cartoonists’ praxis of such depiction can be understood using the work of comics scholars such as Charles Hatfield and Hillary Chute, who describe the particular capacity of comics as a medium for self-representation and the depiction of trauma, respectively. Regards from Serbia exemplifies their arguments and those of Arva and Rothberg through the evocative portrait of wartime Serbia captured in its transcendence of realist norms.2 31 Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Part one: The Former Yugoslav States I argue that Zograf’s depictions of characters’ subjective visualizations of Serbian life, the role of art in mediating everyday experiences, and surrealistic imagery in Regards from Serbia convey the power of depicting trauma in the mixed media form of comics. Perspective Drawn ograf’s comics draw on his personal experiences and influences of the art and Zculture of the former Yugoslavia. He began drawing comics in childhood, and later attended art school (Spurgeon). Chris Ware was a major artistic influence for Zograf, although his often frenzied visuals differ stylistically from Ware’s precision (Vervaet 163). Zograf began publishing in the US in the early ‘90s, and his 1994 comic Life Under Sanctions (included in Regards from Serbia) was among the first works to present a Serbian perspective on war in the nineties Yugoslav Wars (Spurgeon). Since 2003, Zograf has published the weekly strip Poloni svet (“The Second-Hand World”) in the Belgrade magazine Vreme (Morton 74). As a Serbian cartoonist, Zograf participates in a tradition dating back to at least January 1932, when the magazine Veseli Četvrtak [Joyful Thursday], which prominently featured comic strips, was first published (Zupan 90). Several years later, in March 1936, magazine Mika Miš began regularly showcasing the work of local artists (Zupan 93). The popularity of Serbian comics continued throughout the thirties, but was then hamstrung by the 1941 Nazi attack on Belgrade (Zupan 100). Half a century later, Zograf carries on the Serbian comics tradition, but does so through a depiction of Serbian life during the nineties and shortly thereafter. Between 1987 and 1997, as a result in large part of the reign of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, real average pay decreased by fifty percent, the rate of population increase fell from a rise of two per thousand to a decline of three per thousand, and murders doubled (Sell 359). Resolution 757, a measure passed by the UN Security Council in May 1992, banned trade and restricted international travel, which led to Serbia being “cut off from the rest of the world” (Norris 161). Government-controlled media during this period portrayed Serbia as the innocent victim of unjust international oppression (Gagnon 96), and the isolation imposed by the sanctions made it difficult for Serbians to access alternative sources of information (Gordy 193). James Gow and Milena Michalski describe this period as being one “in which optimism was almost absent” (156). Zograf’s representation of trauma captures the absence. One method of traumatic depiction can be seen in Zograf’s representations of his and other characters’ subjectivities. This is perhaps the most obvious way to introduce imagery not conforming to the demands of realism within a narrative set in a real- world milieu, as the images can be explained through the characters’ perspectives. Stija Vervaet sees the question of how to represent such perspectives, whether through the visualization of subjectivity or otherwise, as a central issue of Zograf’s work: 32 Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Un-Drawn Experience: Visualizing Trauma in Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia “The traumatic experience Zograf’s avatar must work through is related not to the past but to the nightmarish present, yet the question remains how to render visible this experience” (168). Indeed, a primary way in which Zograf shows such working through is with the explicit explanation of surreal images as being imagery existing within characters’ heads. The most frequent depiction of Zograf’s subjectivity occurs in the drawings of the dreams of his cartoon stand-in (whom I subsequently refer to as “Aleksandar”), which frequently concern animals or animal-like creatures. In an interview with Tom Spurgeon, Zograf describes his comics as depicting Serbia in the nineties as “reflected through the mind of a dreamy and half-witted person such as myself,” and this reflection can be seen throughout the literal dreaminess of Regards from Serbia. The book’s first panel contains a caption in which Zograf writes, “I wake up with the memory of a frog-like image I saw while in a half-dream state,” accompanied by an image of a person’s body with a frog’s head on top (11). A later caption describes “a large and mean dog-like animal” being attacked by Zograf and his father with knives and forks, and the corresponding drawing, accordingly, shows a snarling creature with utensils sticking out of his body (66). Animals also appear in Zograf’s dreams in a panel he identifies as showing “a vivid dream about a dinosaur,” a caption Zograf pairs with an image of Aleksandar sleeping and a thought balloon showing his dream Fig. 1. A man dreams of a beast from Regards from Serbia, Top Shelf, 2007, p. 54. 33 Reprint from “Comics of the New Europe” - ISBN 978 94 6270 212 7 - ©Leuven University Press, 2020 Part one: The Former Yugoslav States avatar watching the creature (240). The repetitiveness of these panels suggests a need to authenticate his oneiric visions: whereas more realistic imagery would perhaps be accepted by the reader more readily, the redundancy between the captions and drawings indicates a desire to emphasize the images’ veracity.

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