Tag: protest

• Drawing as Protest in The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Petr Sís – Abstract

  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.

  

  • Comics about Comics Studies
    If there is one thing in this world that I have always loved that is overcomplicating things. (And dinosaurs). So I was extra happy that I could work on this comic about comics, what is more, comics about comics studies. My comics are part of a larger project, published in the volume Comics Is…: Debating… Read more: Comics about Comics Studies
  • Fake Birds – New Riso Zine
    I feel that the mini zine format is what I need to be doing right now! Here is a new riso-printed mini zine about my frustration about AI-generated animals. I do not believe that we need fake videos about artificial animals jumping around–but I made an attempt to analyze and understand some aspects of the… Read more: Fake Birds – New Riso Zine
  • Where is the flow? — New Riso Zine
    I have made a new zine titled Where is the Flow? It is about anxieties around creativity and self-expression and it is a fictional monologue of a Hungarian woman called Ildikó. I was selling this zine–along with other comics I co-created or edited– at the Helsinki Zine festival, 20-21 September 2025. I loved the location… Read more: Where is the flow? — New Riso Zine

  2021.03.22