Autobiography in comics

Polish autobiographical comics, if you take a closer look at them, have quite a rich history. Tomasz Pstrągowski rightly notes that its roots of autobiography in Polish comics can be sought back in the 1960s. Mieczyslaw Kuczynski, the author of "The History of the 2nd Corps... differently!" used admittedly not so much comic book shorthand, but rather drawings, similar to the caricatures published in the interwar press. Kuczynski's works are referred to as paracomics as a matter of precaution, but the collection of them - which form a coherent story - in a single issue, prevents them from being called simply caricatures.

Us or Me?

The autobiographical nature of Kuczynski's work is sometimes debatable, as the author happened to use the form "I" only once - he mainly uses the plural "we." However, saturated with humor and distance, it is possible to conclude that such an approach to the issues presented can only be had by a witness, a participant in the events described. And this testimony is a particularly important element of autobiographical works. Researcher Malgorzata Czerminska has coined for the purpose of analyzing this type of literature the term autobiographical triangle, in which testimony is intertwined with confession and challenge.

Non-obvious biography

However, without going too deep into literary considerations here, one element cannot be passed by indifferently. Well, autobiographical literature used to use the first person - writing from the level of "I" is a clear signal to the recipient that the edition he holds in his hand may have an autobiographical feature. Well, exactly: it may or may not. Just as a work created in the third person singular, for example, can contain autobiographical elements.
It does not have to be a story that we would strictly speaking call a biography, and yet after looking at the silhouette of the creator, it is quite easy to find clues, more or less veiled, leading directly to the author's biography.

Is everything a biography?

Why is this the case? Again, this is a topic for an argument from the borderline of sociology of literature, human psyche, and literary studies. In a nutshell: everything an author puts on paper comes from his memory, so indirectly everything written is to some extent biographical, his own. Whether it's character traits or an event, everything was first processed by the cogs of the author's memory. And memory is personal: it will emphasize some elements, skew others, and completely blur others. That is why a memoir, as Marek Zaleski wrote, is always a fusion of art and memory.

This alone accounts for the autobiographical nature of writing in general, as confirmed by the thoughts of Michał Paweł Markowski: "(...) is it possible for someone who writes to want to disappear under a pile of paper at his request, can literature, and even art in general, disregard our passions and limit itself only to the invisible movements of the intellect on the black-and-white chessboard of writing?".

Autobiography in the world of comics

Polish comics have long forgotten both autobiography and documentary art in general. Not surprisingly, comics did not have an easy life in socialist Poland. Here it was rather associated with the rotten West, and its pictorial message quite quickly began to serve government propaganda.

The rash of Polish autobiographical comics came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Wilhelm Sasnal, Michał Śledziński, and Agata Nowicka. At that time, the world of comics had already produced such works (including graphic novels) as those by Robert Crumb, Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Harvey Pekar and Art Spiegelman. In the case of the last-mentioned creator, one can speak of a hint of Polish contribution, since Art was a Jew of Polish origin, and his fate in the country was intertwined first with Czestochowa, a little later with Silesia.

Popular literature - a medium chosen deliberately

Today the autobiographical comic is doing as well in Poland as it is in the world. In the spring the news cooed that a comic autobiography by Quentin Tarantino was being made. And while otherwise, the choice of such a form of communication could be controversial, in the case of the director it is surprisingly less so. Quentin himself is such a peculiar character (as are his films) that it is difficult to expect stiffness from him. Creating cinematic images in the trend of postmodern pop culture, although unreflective, laced with sarcasm, and subversive, he is an excellent not only filmmaker, but also a product of the popular art of his time. The choice of a borderline form, which is unquestionably the comic book, seems to have been an outstanding idea in his case.