The new project that I am undertaking with the help of Patreon folks is partly a conference presentation and partly an issue I have wanted to explore for a while now.
I have been interested in how postcolonial theories could be used on postsoviet life and stuff – this is happening in literature and in flim, but comics haven’t been studied in this respect. Or not enough.
I am also interested in drawing as a way of protest.
So in the next project I’ll try to explore these ideas: the trick in the whole endeavour is that I have two weeks left until the annual conference of the Comics Studies society.
The first post, in which I introduce the topic and Czech illustrator Petr Sís, is already on patreon for anyone to read – so it is not restricted to Patrons only this time. There are a lot of amazing images by Petr Sís, check it out.
I am looking forward to the 2021 conference of the Comics Studies Society. The topic this year is Re/Building Community. Here is my abstract.
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain is Petr Sís’s multiple award-winning graphic memoir about his childhood in what is now the Czech Republic and what used to be Czechoslovakia. In my presentation I argue that contrasting public space – a space of politics, social pressure, and danger – and private space – hidden and small places of creative self-expression – is a central topic of the memoir. Sís’s narrative successfully mobilizes page design, that is, the distribution of drawn elements in space, in order to illustrate and demonstrate the spatial tensions of life under Communism. I will study the visual metaphors that playfully represent the persistent revolt of a community.
I show that the narrative can be interpreted as a creative protest against intellectual, political, and physical walls and borders: on each page, Sís reinterprets the revolt against the wall as a symbol and as a physical presence. In The Wall, the creative individual cannot be limited by walls imposed upon it and the walls isolating the individual from the community. Art is shown as self-expression and as a link between people, but also as a dangerous activity threatening the artists themselves in a system of surveillance. Art – be it drawing on a canvas or on a wall or playing in a band – is shown in the pictures as indispensable to bringing the wall down. At the same time, the textual layer drags these almost idealistic scenarios down to earth by providing details about the political and cultural contexts of Communism.
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) in Brussels on 4 July 2025.
Eszter Szép 