Komiks: Comic Art in Russia

Introduction: Komiks Agonistes

3 Introduction Komiks Agonistes Those who grew up in the land of the Soviets will say that, just as we didn’t have sex, we didn’t have comics. — G u liae v Everyone knows that we are “gangsters, trampling on the sacred name of art,” that our works are “little pictures for morons,” that our muse is “a mad radioactive mutant.” — K h ik h u s In December 2003, the exhibit Apocalypse Today (Apokalipsis sego dnia) opened at the World of Art Museum (WAM) gallery in Moscow. Billed as a modern revival of the sixteenth-century tradition of illustrated miniatures produced by the Russian Orthodox Church, the show brought together thirteen artists’ visions of the Book of Revelations. The works ranged from the humor-laden reinventions of prophecy by Georgy “Zhora” Litichevsky; the weightless, hallucinogenic sojourns of John to the higher realms, limned by Alim Velitov; the fantasy stylings of Askold Akishin; the monumental apparitions of Ilya Savchenkov; the faux naïve buffoonery of Pavel “Khikhus” Sukhikh, among others. The religious theme linked the exhibit to the rising interest in traditional culture among many post-Soviet Russians, but its medium announced it as very much a novelty, something few in the country would have even considered art at all—for Apocalypse Today was among the earliest gallery shows devoted solely to the ongoing renaissance in Russian comic art. 4 Introduction It proved a breakthrough: in a country where comics often appear as short pieces or strips in children’s magazines or advertisements, gallery visitors could view these biblically themed sequential narratives (some several pages long) and get a real sense of the medium’s sophistication: its breadth of styles, diversity of designs, word/image meldings—as well as its links to past visual culture practices . After decades in the shadows, Russian comics were making their long-awaited debut. Perhaps. Yet, for all the attention generated by Apocalypse Today (some of the displayed works also appeared in WAM’s celebrated art journal), its origins bore an object lesson for the optimists who saw a new dawn. Yegor Larichev, editor of the journal and initiator of the exhibit, told a reporter that he had intended to produce a film adaption of Revelations, but fell short on funding. As a secondary measure, he turned to comics, which he described as “close to film” (Malpas). Larichev, far from the only Russian cultural figure to see the medium as derivative of other, perhaps “higher” art forms,1 saw Apocalypse Today as a sort of sketch, a stopgap, for his original vision, to give viewers an idea of what the real project (a filmed version) would look like. Such, the reader will discover, have been the fortunes of this medium in the land of the Czars, the Soviets, and the Siloviki.2 The subject of this book, Russian comics, or komiks, belongs to an ancient world tradition of sequential narrative often combining word and image that entered its modern phase simultaneously with the rise of cinema (about 1895), but never enjoyed its popularity or, until recently, its estimation as an art form. In this as in so many other areas of life, the same things happened in Russia as in other parts of the world—only more so. From their origins in the religious icon-making and book-illustration tradition, to the immensely popular lubok or woodblock print of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, to their vilification and marginalization under the Communists, to their economic struggles and Internet “migration” in the post-Soviet era, komiks have often borne the brunt of ideological change—burning in the summers of relative freedom, freezing in the hard winters of official disdain. As many Russians expressed about their own experiences , komiks never had a “normal life.” The Question of Mass Culture For nearly a century the comics medium repeatedly foundered in what Steven Lovell has called “the long and difficult history of modern Russian attempts to grapple with ‘the popular’” (2005: 38). As elaborated in chapter 4, Russia—most acutely under the Soviets—struggled with mass culture (its seduction, its threat) 5 Komiks Agonistes to the extent that it has never existed as a stable concept.3 Despite the ardent dreams of many, and even as the society altered so radically in the 1990s as to make possible an “enormous infusion of the lowbrow” (Barker: 36), even in the commodity-rich age of the post-Soviet...