The language of comics on Russian soil dates back to the country’s earliest religious icon-making tradition, which is to say, to the roots of Christianity and thus of the nation itself.¹ According to Bruce Lincoln, “while frescoes and mosaics proclaimed the glory of God in Keiv’s churches, paintings done on panels of well-seasoned alder, cypress, or lime (over which a layer of linen had been stretched and covered with several thin coats of gesso) became the windows through which the people of Rus entered the world of the spirit to receive the grace of God” (22).² Icons, having come to...

The Bolsheviks, led initially by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, sought a radical break with the traditions of the past as well as with the capitalist West, and launched a bold refashioning of what they saw as backward Russian society into a modern industrialized state grounded on Marxist principles.¹ As a result, the seventy-year Soviet domination of Russia inaugurated by the Communist revolution of November 7, 1917 (new style), proved on the whole disruptive to the development of comics as an art form, consigning it to the margins of culture. Contrary to popular perceptions of comics (or their absence) under communism, however,...

When the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev—the first Communist Party general secretary born after the Revolution—assumed power in March 1985, few predicted the depth of change the Soviet Union would undergo in six short years, leading to its collapse and the restoration of Russia as a quasi-capitalist, quasi-democratic country. Gorbachev’s policies of a new engagement with the West, ending the disastrous military venture in Afghanistan, economic reform, and loosening of censorship transformed Soviet society and opened vast new opportunities for (sub) cultural activities long suppressed. The era of Perestroika (“restructuring”), for the first time in six decades, offered comics the...

The years from 1991 to the present proved among the most exhilarating, groundbreaking, and frustrating of all in the medium’s checkered history. Despite the launching of festivals and journals, the rise of an active online community and publications abroad, efforts to establish a working industry repeatedly came to naught. Still, the “Second Wave” komiks subculture in contemporary Russia brings together an array of talent, diversity, and professionalism never before seen. Much disaffection remains, but the road to today’s gains was not easily paved, as shown in this chapter’s overview.

Surveying the landscape for Russian comics in the mid-1990s, Sakov made...

Writing on the 2003 group exhibit “Viewing Area” at Moscow’s Central House of the Artist, Vladimir Moist betrays the bemusement of some Russian art critics toward the significant trend of comics appropriation in the post-Soviet era. His sardonic phrase “for us the most important of the arts” mocks a well-known utterance attributed to Lenin, “cinema is for us the most important of the arts.” (Recall that the KOM publicationKOM-paniiahad made the same pun in 1988 and had thrown in a drawing of Lenin reading comics to boot.) Similarly, theKulturacritic Konstantin Bokhorov, assessing the 2007 KomMissia Festival,...

As described by Anna Krylova in a 1999 essay on Russian subversion, laughter, and jokes, New Russians (novie russkie) are “a post-Soviet sociocultural category widely used in contemporary Russia to refer, usually unflatteringly, to the group of people who have ‘made it’ under the new market-economy conditions” (261). Recent critical discussions of the New Russians have highlighted both their “mythical” status and their precipitous slide (at least in their original form) into the dustbin of history.

Mark Lipovetsky’s essay, in a 2003 issue ofRussian Reviewdevoted to the subject, begins by asking, “Are Those New Russians Real?” before ceding...

The genre of autobiography, a staple of Western comics—especially of the underground and alternative persuasion—has been slow to develop in post-Soviet Russia. This chapter will explore some of the reasons for why this is the case, through a reading of Nikolai Maslov’s comics memoir work and the scandal it provoked among komiksisty upon its publication in 2004 France. The scandal did not register among the Russian public at large, which had never heard of Maslov, nor in the Russian literary scene, as the work has to this day not been published in Maslov’s own country. The contretemps erupted...

In her essay “The Visual Turn and Gender History,” Almira Ustinova posits the gender split in Russian culture as largely falling along a verbal versus visual dynamic. In a familiar move, she associates the masculine with language, the Law of the Father, history, while the feminine—that historically repressed element forever “looking in from the outside”—she relates to the visual register. Ustinova’s argument is more subtle than this description of a simple gender dichotomy might suggest (for one thing it recallsl’ecriture feminineand the critic Julia Kristeva’s notion of the pre-verbal “semiotic”), while its attention to the role...