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.
I am totally thrilled and mesmerized. I feel flattered by the care and attention of the editors and designers at the Ohio State University Press, and I am particularly grateful to Amanda Weiss, who drew the cover.
The cover of my book represents everything that this book is about: first, the vulnerability of bodies, which includes that the onlooker can also experience the vulnerability of his or her body when looking at other bodies. Second, the line: I adore that this cover uses multiple pens and pencils and plays with the qualities of lines used to draw the body. Third: markmaking by hand is actually a thinking process. Fourth, the background invites touch and haptic perception. I am totally in love.
“The exuberance of the prose and lovely phrasing beautifully offset the topic, which is exceptionally well-researched as well as being very clearly elaborated. The book was a pleasure to read and has the potential to reshape scholarly engagements with the material and affective dimensions of comics reading processes.” —Kate Polak, author of Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics (OSU Press, 2017)
“Eszter Szép’s book provides an analysis of the body that is currently undiscussed in the field, not only filling a gap in existing scholarship but also developing a new lens for analysis that highlights the potential for further research and study.” —Harriet Earle, comics scholar and lecturer
Eszter Szép’s Comics and the Body is the first book to examine the roles of the body in both drawing and reading comics within a single framework. With an explicit emphasis on the ethical dimensions of bodily vulnerability, Szép takes her place at the forefront of scholars examining comics as embodied experiences, pushing this line of inquiry into bold new territory. Focusing on graphic autobiography and reportage, she argues that the bodily performances of creators and readers produce a dialogue that requires both parties to experience and engage with vulnerability, thus presenting a crucial opportunity for ethical encounters between artist and reader. Szép considers visceral representations of bulimia, pregnancy, the effects of STIs, the catastrophic injuries of war, and more in the works of Lynda Barry, Ken Dahl, Katie Green, Miriam Katin, and Joe Sacco. She thus extends comics theory into ethical and psychological territory that finds powerful intersections and resonances with the studies of affect, trauma, gender, and reader response.
I am really happy to share that I will be one of the participants of ViTa.
What is ViTa? ViTa is a day devoted to talking about all things science fiction, fantasy, weird, horror, and gaming. The acronym comes from “Meeting of Worlds” (Világok Találkozása) in Hungarian. This is now the third year that we have ViTa. I have enjoyed the first two as a member of the audience, and will be a participant this year on 30 Nov in Bem cinema, Budapest.
Body and Fantasy is the title of the roundtable I am participating it. We will start off by discussing a fantasy novel published this year, Irha és bőr / Fir and Skin by Anita Moskát. This is a really sensitive, smart, and also brutal novel in which animals turn into partly human-partly animal creatures. It is cruel and clever, and I especially love the poetic language that is rich in biological metaphors. It is a novel that would really deserve to be made available for the global market. I am sure that many interesting topics will be addressed.
I have written about Irha és bőr in Hungarian on my blog here. I have also flirted with animal studies when I was approaching Julian Barnes’ fiction. The chapter I wrote is here (the cover of the volume looks really amateurish, but the essays in it are really cool).
Here is the abstract of the presentation I am going to give at the Comics and Art and Design conference of the Comics Forum in Leeds, 7-8 November 2019. Cannot wait! This conference is always so inspiring.
The starting point of my investigation is that comics is a drawn medium, and that this fact has intriguing consequences on how comics narratives work, how they are made, and how they are interpreted. Though there is a growing number of studies of drawing coming from comics scholarship (e.g. Gardner, Baetens, Grennan), in my presentation I apply theories of drawing coming from art history to the study of comics. Obviously, there is no direct correspondence, but I believe questions asked by art historians facilitate creative and fruitful rethinkings of the significance of drawing in comics. Focusing on drawing directs attention to comics as a process and not as a product, as well as to the transmissive nature[1] of reading comics and engagement with them.
I will primarily rely on Norman Bryson’s “A
Walk for a Walk’s Sake” (2003) and Karen Kurczynski’s “Drawing is the New
Painting” (2014), and I will provide readings Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying (2007) inspired by
Bryson’s and Kurczynski’s insight. I will examine associations of rawness and
immediacy in Goblet’s comics, and I will contrast these to the drawn
photographs she also includes in her narrative. Techniques of erasure are
present in both Goblet’s “raw” and “photographic” images, while erasure is a
central topic of the graphic memoir itself. I will also argue that Pretending is Lying can be seen as a
work in the state of becoming, one that is understood not simply by our
cognitive capacities, but by the special ways our bodies understand lines.
[1] Jill Bennett
described art as transmissive in Empathic
Vision (2005).
I’m going to briefly talk about the International Comics Festival of Budapest at PesText, a festival celebrating literature in translation.
I have been organizing this festival for at least 5 years (though I’m not sure), and I have been main organizer in the past 2 years. This year, in order to celebrate the 15th festival, I made the event a 5-day affair. Though I will only have a couple of minutes to talk about this lovechild (honestly: each organizer is in love with comics), it has been so much fun assembling these slides and going over the pictures (90% made by Enikő Bianka Dancs), that I have decided to share it.
Moving Images: Comics and Travel (conference) 5 July 2019 Oxford Comics Network University of Oxford
Traveling to
other dimensions, mapping alien lands, and exploring the unknown both within
the the mind and in one’s (new) environment are common topics of SF comics, yet
in Jesse Jacobs’ comics these topics are handled in very different ways. In By
This Shall You Know Him (2012), Safari Honeymoon (2014), and Crawl
Space (2017), neither space nor creatures are static, they are constantly
in a state of becoming. Their morphing is paradoxically simultaneously organic
and mechanical, it is actual and hallucinatory.
I argue in my
paper that the never-ending morphing of biological and constructed forms is
just as important in exploring the motif of travel as is an actual narratable
and verbally constructed story (of gods practicing creation in By This,
of a couple exploring a jungle in Safari, and of a new dimension in
one’s washing machine in Crawl). I use close reading to analyze the
organic changes of alien life forms’ bodies and alien dimensions, and I show
that these transformations are guided by the changes of panel design and
by the geometry of the page, and not simply by a plotline.
In Safari Honeymoon and Crawl Space, travelling does not simply happen in space or between dimensions, it also takes place within different forms of creatures who are constantly in transition. Jacobs’ amazing visual logic uses repetition, sequencing, isolation, morphing, as well as playing with representing multidimensional spaces and reinterpreting what makes a figure a figure. In his most recent work, Crawl Space, colour is added to this experimental visuality, by which Jacobs does not simply represent the journey or psychedelic trip of the characters, but invites readers to think of comics narratives and narration in new, not easily verbalizible ways.
University of Nebraska Press has launched its comics studies series with a long-needed focus: “By looking at understudied and overlooked texts, artists, and publishers, Encapsulations facilitates a move away from the same “big” and oft-examined texts. Instead the series uses more diverse case studies to explore new and existing critical theories in tune with an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and global approach to comics scholarship.”
I am so happy, honored, and enthusiastic that I can be on the editorial board of this series. Send us manuscripts! More info at the homepage of the press.
Editorial Board
Michelle Ann Abate The Ohio State University
José Alaniz University of Washington
Frederick Luis Aldama The Ohio State University
Julian Chambliss Michigan State University
Margaret Galvan University of Florida
A. David Lewis Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science
Jean-Matthieu Méon University of Lorraine, France
Ann Miller University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Elizabeth Nijdam University of British Columbia, Canada
Barbara Postema Massey University Manawatū, New Zealand
Eszter Szép Independent Researcher, Hungary
Carol Tilley University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Eszter Szép 