One of the greatest honors of my life has been to keynote at the joint conference of IGNCC and IBDS (International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference, International Bande Dessinée Society).
COMPLEX, our collectively made choose-your-own-adventure comic is out for Ukmukfukk zine festival (26-27 April, 2025)! Authors: Anna Benczédi (Romania), Ivana Geček (Croatia), Anamarija Kvas (Croatia), and Eszter Szép (Hungary)
In COMPLEX, you can navigate between many storylines. It starts out at an art exhibition, and depending on your choices, you can test gravity on various space objects, challenge patriarchy with cats, or can help our heroes survive their poor life choices. This is THE choose your own adventure comic from the Balkans that you would not want to miss!
Last autumn (2024) I had the pleasure to co-teach a one-week practical workshop on making comics and feminism. This practical workshop was attended by young creative women studying at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, and and they were so dedicated and hard-working, that we managed to publish an anthology of our work. My co-teacher, Nikoletta Mihalik took on the role of designing our booklet, which contains a lot of 2-page comics on the experience of being a young woman in Hungary today. Topics include body image, work-life balance, wrestling, and the most popular topic is the weigh of expectations.
Have you always wanted a Hungarian comic in which nothing happens? In which Lidl cashiers are grumpy and the protagonists know all Netflix series by heart? Then Weekdays, my first comic book, is for you! Nothing really happens in this story about three siblings. For one of them reality seems darker, gloomier, more unbearable, and the other two brothers try to help him in their own ways.
I am honored to be a mentor and advisor in WOMCOM, a groundbreaking 6-country comics initiative that aims at creating a network for women and non-binary creators in the very patriarchal comics cultures and societies of Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
It Used to Be Easy: Comics about Growth and Change is out now!
The comics were made by MA studentsof MOME ANIM during our Storytellings with Comics course in November 2022. These are personal and cool comics. It was a pleasure to work with the students both as an instructor as an editor: they were eager to learn, listened to advice, and kept very tight deadlines. I absolutely loved teaching this course.
A catalog showcasing contemporary Hungarian comics came out in fall 2021, but I completely forgot to share the news here.
I was working on New Hungarian Comics and Graphic Novels: Speech Bubbles to Leave You Speechless in the spring, it was commissioned by the Petőfi Literary Fund. It was big work: I selected the artists and comics featured in this beautiful catalog, wrote the text about each of them, and selected the images, too. Many of the featured titles has won or has been nominated to the Hungarian comics award.
When I was looking back on 2020 in my January 2021 post, I wrote that the best decision I made was quitting my job at a multinational company in the summer of 2020 (in spite of the pandemic, etc). I was grateful for that decision each and every day of 2021. Though freelancing is hard, it is getting easier and easier to find work. I still could not support myself financially if I lived alone, but I do not live alone, and I can rely on a partner who supports my freelancing projects. All year round, I could work on projects that make sense, which is a wonderful feeling.
I was asked to lecture on the history of comics in the spring term. There are a few things you should know:
#1 I don’t believe in lecturing and any forms of frontal teaching.
#2 I don’t think that students of photography, design theory, or visual communication should sit an exam in the history of comics (in Hungary each lecture must be finished by a written or spoken exam.) They would benefit more about making comics or understanding how they work or getting inspired by them.
I am terrible, I know.
However, this lecture series turned out to be the greatest joy of my spring ’21 quarantine season.
And some student work to tease you. The first two images are stylistic practice, the third one is an adaptation of a poem, the last one is a page analysis – the exercise comes from Nick Sousanis.
Eszter Szép 