Description:
Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and Communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under Communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences.
Contributors: Max Bledstein (University of Winnipeg), Dragana Obradovic (University of Toronto), Aleksandra Sekulic (University of Arts in Belgrade), Pavel Kořínek (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague), Martin Foret (Palacký University), Michael Scholz (Uppsala University), Sean Eedy (Carleton University), Elizabeth Nijdam (University of British Columbia), Ewa Stańczyk (University of Amsterdam), Eszter Szép (Eötvös Loránd University)
Review Quotes:
Carefully edited by two specialists of comics culture and Slavic culture with a longtime interest in the margins
of Western culture, this collection on the comics culture of Central and Eastern Europe (that is the countries
that have progressively joined the EU after the fall of the Berlin Wall) is much more than an eye-opener. The
book does not only disclose a wide range of a virtually "unknown" production (and why not confess that I felt
ashamed of my own ignorance as a European scholar after reading Comics of the New Europe?), it also offers a
new insight of the very meaning of making and reading comics in cultural, economic, political and ideological
contexts that are sometimes very different from what we take for granted. Jan Baetens, IMAGE
[&] NARRATIVE, Vol. 22, No.1 (2021)