Nine key events of Czech(oslovak) history in a caustic, ironic, dismal, as well as playful, hyperbole.
Comics
This monumental comics series by experienced historian and journalist, Pavel Kosatík, looks back at key moments of Czech history – from the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 to its separation into the States of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. The first medium for Kosatík’s scripts was Czech Television; concurrently with the broadcasting of the series, the Mladá fronta publisher started publishing comic books, which, based on (more or less) modified Kosatík scripts, were always drawn by different cartoonists, usually one generation younger. This is the reason for the different mood of each comic book: the volume Jak Gottwald zavraždil Slánského (How Gottwald Murdered Slánský, 2014) is extreme, suggestive, greatly conceived by Vojtěch Mašek’s non-standard drawings; by contrast, the playful collages in Jiří Husák’s work Jak z rock’n’rollu vznikla Charta 77 (How Charter 77 Arose out of Rock’n’roll, 2016) creatively use contemporaneous photos of Václav Havel and other dissidents, as well as pictures of men in police uniforms. A distinctive approach was presented by Karel Jerie; in his work Jak Dubček kapituloval v Moskvě (How Dubček Capitulated in Moscow, 2016), he added dinosaur heads to the bodies of Czech and Soviet communists, accurately depicting the physiognomies of the historical figures even in this form. Kosatík and the cartoonists he cooperated with have created more than just trivially educative works: their comics are inspirational, provocative and original, while depicting the historical events honestly and suggestively
Read an excerpt from the book here.
Pavel Kosatík (1962) is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He graduated from the Faculty of Law, Charles University in Prague, and has worked as a lawyer and editor. He started out as a sci-fi author but is now better known for his non-fiction writing and his TV scripts. He has won numerous prizes, including the Tom Stoppard Prize for essays and the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize for journalism.