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Reviewed by:
  • Komiks: Comic Art in Russia
  • Jeffrey Brooks
Komiks: Comic Art in Russia. By José Alaniz (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 288 pp.).

Is there a story to tell about comics in Russia? The very idea seems implausible. Comic strips in newspapers, comic books, underground comics, and even graphic novels depend on a vibrant commercial culture, which Russia has long lacked. Yet Jose Alaniz in this pioneering study suggests a different conclusion, though a sad one. He considers not only varied forms of "comic art" but also the traditions and parallel creative activities that comprise a wider context. This approach makes sense since the story of comics in Russia is largely that of a suppressed, or at least much constrained, group of graphic forms. It is hard to imagine another way to approach the subject. Similarly, the authors of a Russian volume entitled Russian Comics (Russkii komiks), which was also published in 2010, include essays on many related forms of graphic expression, from icons and children's literature to prison tattoos, propaganda posters, and conceptual art.1 In fact, the authors of the Russian volume seem to focus on everything except what is usually considered comics elsewhere. Alaniz cannot be accused of ignoring comics in the familiar sense, though he does explore many of the topics discussed in the Russian volume.

Alaniz divides his book into two parts. In the first, he explores the historical trajectory of Russian comic-like expression from the late imperial era through the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the second, he considers contemporary forms. He begins the first chapter with the graphic language of icons but turns quickly to the popular prints known as the lubok (plural lubki). These lithographs became a leading form of popular visual culture in nineteenth-century Russia and were eventually recast as chromolithographs by the end of the century. They share some features with the comic strip. Their creators usually joined text and image in a single picture or in a series of images on a single sheet, though there were also occasional chapbook versions. The secular prints—there were religious ones as well—were produced virtually without censorship almost until the Emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861. Even when censored, however, they were lightly supervised and retained much of their original character, though not their occasional bawdiness. They were hardly equivalent to comic books or comic strips in the press elsewhere but early Russian avant-garde artists drew on them, as Alaniz notes, to make chapbooks and broadsides that were closer in some respects to actual comics.

Alaniz also discusses satirical cartoons in newspapers and in the satirical journals that flourished in the last half century of the Russian old regime. These [End Page 845] forms lacked the persistent storyline and familiar characters typical of early comics elsewhere, however. In the chapter on the Soviet era, he discusses how artists, writers, and propagandists played with this double tradition of art and pop culture until the Stalinist regime curtailed such graphic innovations. Needless to say, even early Soviet images and texts usually had more in common with the art of propaganda elsewhere than with comics.

These early chapters are interesting, but where Alaniz breaks new ground is with his discussion of comics after the fall of communism. After an initial moment of excitement and success, when some comics appeared in editions of million or more, the environment soon changed and by the mid-1990s, the producers of Russian comics were at a loss to find a market for their wares. He shows that technology was in part their undoing as was the importance of cartoon films, the competition of foreign imports, and the lasting suspicion of popular culture the low arts. In this period, as he puts it, while publishing faltered, "the popular Russian prejudice against comics did just fine" (93).

In the second section, he notes three streams of comic art, would-be Mainstream, which included artists who tried to follow models elsewhere; WebKomiks, which were the work of freelance writers and artists and often sold on the internet; and lastly ArtKomiks, which owe much to the dissident Russian conceptualist and so-called sots...

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