Meanwhile, elsewhere - The Century of Czech Comics

Meanwhile, elsewhere – with these words, comics artists inform their readers that the narrative they are presenting is going to include a turning point, that something has changed, that something is going to be different now. Few stories, whether entirely made up or based on accurate historical documents, can be fully told from only a single uninterrupted point of view without losing something very important.  

• The current exhibit, too, strives for a plurality of perspectives, a diversity of individual “pieces of narration”. In the attempt to tell the story of Czech comics so as to be able to track its course over 100 years of Czech (or Czechoslovak) independence, we gave up on the idea of a strictly chronological exposition, which seems to offer a fixed and undeniable conceptual framework, but actually forces all involved into fettered obedience. Czech comics underwent enough of fettering and forced obedience in the 20th century, and we certainly do not want to add to it. 

•  The individual themes of the exhibit aim to offer multiple perspectives – sections focusing on specific genres encounter others devoted to the nodal moments of Czech history – from founding legends to the times of darkest peril. But with these, too, we do not wish to merely show them the way they looked at that time – we are interested in historical reflection, how these central tales of the national historical consciousness were portrayed and interpreted through comics: both at the time and now in hindsight. The ambit of themes itself offers questions of cultural transfer: we see how Czech comics communicated and communicate today with artists and stories from other cultural contexts. 

•  Modern Czech comics set out in search of readers at about the same time that Czechs and Slovaks made a state together. In the hundred years since those relatively timid magazine beginnings, since Šprýmovné kousky Frantíka Vovíska a kozla Bobeše [The Pranks of Frantík Vovísek and Bobeš the Goat] (1922) by Josef Lada, it has come quite a long way. By no means was the course always straight, nor was it even carefully set, frequent obstacles sometimes brought doubts over whether it would even be able to continue. But it always found the path in the end: even though it sometimes seemed like the way was hopelessly blocked, meanwhile, elsewhere – in another genre, through another form, in another way – Czech comics were stepping out once again.                                                                                           

Partners: Centrum pro studia komiksu AV ČR, Univerzita Palackého