This book explores the problematic publication history of komiks—an art form much-maligned as “bourgeois” mass diversion before, during, and after the collapse of the USSR—with an emphasis on the last twenty years. Using archival research, interviews with major artists and publishers, and close readings of several works, it provides heretofore unavailable access to the country’s rich—but unknown—comics heritage. It examines the dizzying experimental comics of the late Czarist and early revolutionary era, caricature from the satirical journal Krokodil, and the postwar series Petia Ryzhik (the “ ... More

This book explores the problematic publication history of komiks—an art form much-maligned as “bourgeois” mass diversion before, during, and after the collapse of the USSR—with an emphasis on the last twenty years. Using archival research, interviews with major artists and publishers, and close readings of several works, it provides heretofore unavailable access to the country’s rich—but unknown—comics heritage. It examines the dizzying experimental comics of the late Czarist and early revolutionary era, caricature from the satirical journal Krokodil, and the postwar series Petia Ryzhik (the “Russian Tintin”). The book presents detailed case studies that include the Perestroika-era KOM studio, the first devoted to comics in the Soviet Union; post-Soviet comics in contemporary art; autobiography and the work of Nikolai Maslov; and women’s comics by such artists as Elena Uzhinova, Namida, and Re-I. It looks at such issues as anti-Americanism, censorship, the rise of consumerism, globalization (e.g., in Russian manga), the impact of the Internet, and the hard-won establishment of a comics subculture in Russia. Komiks have often borne the brunt of ideological change—thriving in summers of relative freedom, freezing in hard winters of official disdain. This book covers the art form’s origins in religious icon-making and book illustration, and later the immensely popular lubok or woodblock print. It reveals comics’ vilification and marginalization under the Communists, its economic struggles, and its eventual Internet “migration” in the post-Soviet era. The book shows that Russian comics never had a “normal life”.