The day has come when I can proudly share with you that my book has been released! I really enjoyed writing it and discussing my ideas at conferences. I just love this topic. I am really happy now!
I am so grateful for the support of my husband and friends and for EAAS for their postgrad research grant to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. Without them and it I really could not have written this book.
In this book I examine the role of the body in drawing and reading comics within a single framework. In each chapter I approach a different aspect of embodied interaction with comics (drawing lines; drawing bodies; drawing style; reading bodies and abstract lines; interacting with a book object). This is an interdisciplinary book that is equally inspired by art practice, feminist ethics, and materiality studies.
If you are interested, I’d like to recommend two videos for further info: In this video I discuss my research with Frederick Louis Aldama.
And I made this short video to introduce the basic ideas of my book:
Contrary to the myths inherited from the 80s and later, the graphic novel was not invented or made popular exclusively by Will Eisner or his manager. In my latest Patreon project I dig into the origins of the graphic novel format and I also explore the origins of the term. A teaser of the project is now available for anyone on my website.
The project itself is longer than this teaser and is more argumentative. It is based on Dreaming the Graphic Novel by Paul Williams (Rutgers UP, 2020). I absolutely recommend this book. And my Patreon! Have I mentioned my Patreon in this paragraph yet?
The project on Patreon (ha!) shows that in the 60s and 70s many people had many ideas about how comics should be rethought. Yes, creators, publishers, editors, retailers thought that comics was in need of some change.
I do not dwell on this moral and financial crisis for long in my Patreon project (check!) , instead, I show the diversity of things people were doing and thinking AT THE SAME TIME. This is a dynamic and exciting age: noone knew that the graphic novel will turn out to be successful. They did not know it would be called graphic novel!
Why Patreon? I am experimenting with new formats to keep on doing research, thinking, and discussing ideas. As some of you know, I am outside Academia, which gives me a hard time, but I have watched dozens of Neil Gaiman motivational speeches and I am actively looking for alternative ways to share what I know and to learn from you all.
Distinguished guests, behold the project teaser:
The argumentation and further details of how people were experimenting with long format comics is available on Patreon, where my previous project is also available: You can also listen to an audio/podcast/thing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. Here is the link: patreon.com/eszterszep
Ellentétben a 80-as években (és utána) népszerűvé vált mítoszokkal, a graphic novelt nem Will Eisner vagy a managere találta ki vagy kezdte el népszerűsíteni. A graphic novel szót 1964-ben alkotta meg egy egészen konkrét ember egy egészen konkrét szándékkal – és a hetvenes évek folyamán igen sokan használták.
Legutóbbi Patreon projectemben annak jártam utána, honnan származik a graphic novel formátum és maga a szó. A hatvanas évek végén és a hetvenes években az USÁ-ban nagyon sokan sokfélét gondoltak arról, hogyan kéne újragondolni a képregényt. Bizony, igen sok alkotó, kiadó, szerkesztő, terjesztő úgy gondolta, hogy ráfér a kifejezési formára az újragondolás.
A projectemben ezzel az anyagi és morális válsággal is foglalkozom kicsit, de leginkább azt mutatom be, hogy mennyire sokféle ellentmondó dolgot gondoltak és csináltak a képregényesek EGYSZERRE. Egy dinamikus, izgi, változó korszak ez: senki sem tudta, hogy a képregénykönyv sikeres lesz, és azt sem, hogy a neve végül az lesz, hogy graphic novel.
Fogadjátok szeretettel ezt a rövide beharangozót, a teljes gondolatmenet (ami a Patreonon olvasható) ennél nyilván részletesebb.
Miért Patreon? Ezzel a formával kísérletezem, hogy a kutatást, a gondolkodást, és a beszélgetést egyetemi lehetőségek híján folytatni tudjam. Nagyon hálás vagyok a támgatóknak morális, anyagi és gyakorlati síkon is: ez az anyag például az egyik támogató kérdése folyamán lett kb 15%-kal hosszabb, mint eredetileg terveztem.
Itt találjátok a részletes gondolatmenetet a korábbi, Ursula K. Le Guinről szóló projecttel együtt: patreon.com/eszterszep
Children’s comics is undergoing a change in Hungary: in recent years several YA graphic novels have been translated and further titles are promised. In this small country with a conservative book industry, publishers have been hesitant to publish book format comics, and publishers of children’s literature did not publish comics at all. This seems to be undergoing a change, and I am really happy about it.
The target audience of comics in this country is 20-40 year-olds, most magazine format and book format comics are sold directly on festivals and comics fairs. The canonical works of the 1980s – comics have grown up – era are translated now + newer titles by DC and Marvel, which results in a masculine market that is a) unacknowledged by the gatekeepers of literature (literary publishers, magazines, writers, influencers) b) not particularly open to children’s titles.
I hope that the new children’s titles will attract young readers and also hope that there will be a time when Hungarian authors will also be able to have their stories published as beautiful colorful books.
In my essay I provide a background on the history of children’s comics in Hungary and also of the prevailing stereotypes about comics.
The stereotype that comics will a) teach children to read or b) make children like literature is particularly strong in this country because until the 1980s the ONLY available comics were adaptations of literary works. This tie with literature was the only way comics could survive until state socialism but it has a big drawback: for decades it has been DEFAULT to compare comics to the original literary works and get disappointed. The literary work was shortened, which was deemed barbaric, the comics were text heavy (but noone noticed that in a way we do, because they did not know comics of the capitalist west), and the children were still not queuing in the library to borrow the original literary works!
I also speculate the reasons why children’s literature is so sceptical about comics, claiming that one of the reasons is the culture of collecting toys and gimmicks, which is associated with cheap entertainment. This culture arrived in the late 1980s and in the 1990s. In this era new kinds of comics were allowed to be printed (breaking away from literary adaptations) which were most of the time related to cartoons. Children (among them myself 🙂 ) in this era met comics in a complex transmedial environment: magazines, books, stickers, notebooks, scented rubbers, cartoon series, anime series (of course we did not know the word anime). All this culture of objects and the idea of collecting are alien to the culture of children’s literature in Hungary, and I might be wrong, but this might be the first essay in Hungary that deals with this topic. (I have learned a lot about comics and transmedia from Frederick Luis Aldama’s interview with Benjamin Woo – it’s on youtube, check it out.)
I was also asked to include how comics can be read, somehow this question is very important in Hungary. I am constantly asked how one reads comics properly, and in 2018 when I was co-curating a major comics exhibition I also had to address this issue in one of the texts on the walls. I use the “art of tensions”, the model by Charles Hatfield in Alternative Comics (2005) because I think the idea of having four layers of meaning is a simple model that shows the complex beauty of comics. This model is also very teachable – the portal where my essay is published addresses teachers and professionals working with children’s literature, and I hope they will find my essay and Hatfield’s model useful.
I am honored to be part of Frederick Luis Aldama aka Professor LatinX’s videocast series: Frederick invites comics scholars to talk about how they got interested in reading and researching comics, what they do, what are the most important questions that drive them.
In the video, I start with how I arrived at comics scholarship: at the end of my MA I was given the best advice ever, namely, that I should not start a PhD unless I am absolutely dedicated to my topic and to this path. So for a couple of years I did other things, I travelled, I worked as a teacher – and I found comics. (My MA was about John Keats, the Romantic poet and John Locke’s philosophy of language.) I also talk about the most important aspects of my book as well as some recent publications and briefly about Hungarian comics.
I recommend listening to other episodes of the series. I have learned a lot from them, and I think it is fascinating to learn about how many different aspects of comics people are researching. This videocast is also very personal, and it is nice to get to know scholars a bit.
My video was released some months ago but I forgot to write about it here.
I am happy to share with you my first finished Patreon project.
Patreon projects help me keep on academic work in the circumstances I do not want to waste time on describing now, I have done so here, in the general introduction of my Patreon endeavor. Patreon projects are academic investigations that create a bridge between what I do in English and what I do in Hungarian, and I am really grateful for the patrons for allowing me to carry on thinking.
MY FIRST FINISHED PATREON PROJECT has two parts: a) an essay on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle in Hungarian and b) an audio / podcast on the same topic in English.
Ursula K. Le Guin is acknowledged as one of the writers who undermined inherited fantasy tropes, wrote different quests and different conflicts, did not use characters who were evil just because they loved being evil, and, importantly, created tons of interesting female characters and made the gender of the characters a decisive factor. There is a sense of deep wisdom in all of her works.
I show that we can understand the Earthsea cycle in a new way if we see that vulnerability is gradually becoming a central topic of the six books of the cycle. I talk about the ethics of vulnerability (which is a key idea in my upcoming book, Comics and the Body), and then I show how this works in the second book of the cycle, The Tombs of Atuan. I tried to give many examples and no spoilers. I think it is understandable even if you haven’t read the book yet. I hope so!
These past months have been very difficult because it seems that being from Eastern Europe and being primarily a comics scholar (though I have also taught literature) make it impossible to get a job in academia either here in Hungary or in the EU / UK. This has negatively influenced all my other projects, such as our podcast, the various guest posts I write to blogs, the academic articles I should be writing (because I simply do not accept that I should quit) and I became more and more gloomy. I do not want to bore you with this, I am sure you have also had some negative spirals in your life. What usually helps in my case is watching Neil Gaiman interviews and feed on his creative positive energy.
I have also decided to share my work (and also my difficulties) more openly because I love working on/with comics and recently I have felt so dark and alone.
Here is a chain of tweets that explains my motives. You can find my page on patreon.com/eszterszep. I have spent some time in making the tiers personal, have a visit if you have the time.
Editors Martha Kuhlman and José Alaniz have found, explored, brought to us a topic that is hardly ever discussed: the comics of Eastern Europe. I am so happy that they thought about Hungary, too, and I could contribute with a chapter on a brief history of Hungarian comics and on contemporary autobiographical comics in Hungary. Thank you, Martha and José, for this collection.
Often, when the phrase “European comics” is uttered, what people mean is French or Belgian comics. However, the countries of Eastern Europe have their own diverse comics traditions. Why are they diverse and what are they like? At the end of the 19th century, magazine culture was hot and trendy in Europe, and the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were no exceptions. Nationalism at the rise, these countries had worked hard to have press in their native languages and not in German. These papers started publishing political satirical cartoons — just like Punch in Britain. In Hungary, these papers often borrowed German and Austrian cartoons and jokes. So the national press, at least in Hungary, was part of a broader European press culture and development of visual culture. We even ripped off the Yellow kid!
However, before WW2 in Hungary Jewish-owned businesses were banned, and this affected many magazines and periodicals. After WW2, under the Soviet invasion, comics were banned as they were considered to have bad imperialistic American ideological influence.
After a while, especially after the 1956 unsuccessful revolution against Soviet rule, some entertainment was offered to the people as diversion, and a few pages of comics were also published in some magazines of entertainment. These comics were adaptations of literary works, and were hugely popular.
In Hungary, comics from the 1950s onward developed completely without American influence (some left-wing French stuff was translated later, though), and the ideological decision to exclude imperial influence had very material and aesthetic consequences: these comics look very different.
During Soviet rule, each country in Eastern Europe had their own comics traditions, and after 1989 they each developed different discourses in the medium of comics. I am so happy that I could contribute with a chapter on contemporary Hungarian comics. Interestingly, we do not really have works that would study our past in a reflective or personal way (yet). I have seen in Comics of the New Europe that some countries have very serious and interesting working through going on in comics. I cannot wait to find out more about the collection, the Introduction, which I have had time to read so far, is really interesting.
… in Hungarian. The literary journal “Alföld” kindly commissioned comics reviews for its May issue (link). The plan was to sync these with the International Comics Festival Budapest. The festival was cancelled, and the journal ran out of funding so it only publishes online instead of print and cannot pay the authors for an indefinite amount of time.
Culture is in a terrible position in Hungary, it is a noble hobby and the frustration caused by the lack of money slowly kills you inside. But I am an optimist today (my position on the optimist-let’s die now axis changes every day), and I am happy that I could write a review of these two comics in Hungarian.
Why are these comics important?
Hungary has a limited comics market: the majority of the titles is interesting for a male readership in their 30s and 40s. I can understand this: they are the ones who buy comics, and the publishers want to sell. Plus publishers belong to that age group. (Naturally, as every trend, this one exists among other trends and is not absoulute.)
When the guys mentioned above were children, there were no comics that could have addressed a girl readership, so they are missing now.
Some publishers realized that it is vitally important to address young readers today — they are the comics readers of the future!
Some publishers realized that it is vitally important to bring in comics that are not about superheroes and white males.
Because of points 3 and 4 in the above list, the publication of Nimona and Women in Battle is very important: they address a new reader group, that of teenage girls. I hope their audience finds them.
(I analyze the comics scene in Hungary from a gender point of view in the 2019/4 issue of Csillagszálló. It will soon be published online at Dot &Line.)
I am happy and proud to show you the first academic comic I co-created: Lines and Bodies.
This is an argumentative piece on some of the ways in which our bodies are involved in reading comics. It draws on theories by Laura U Marks, Robert Vischer, and James Elkins. The text and the art together show that there is more to comics than what meets the eye: in fact, we interpret lines, dynamism, direction, texture, movement based on the experiences of our bodies. These ideas are also found in my book, Comics and the Body, which will come out in November 2020 with the Ohio State University Press.
The artist who illustrated it is Boglárka Littner, a really smart young artist who is my mentee at Milestone Institute, Budapest and who is interested in making comics and sculptures.
Eszter Szép 