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Slovakia.

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Slovakia

1947

In short

Slovak comics grew out of humour and satire magazines.

Picture stories appeared in Černokňažník from 1876 and later in Kocúr, and after 1947 serial strips ran in Šidlo and the satirical weekly Roháč, home of Jozef Schek's Jožinko and Božena Plocháňová's Bill a Mary. Under communist rule comics were treated as a bourgeois genre and survived mainly as serials in children's magazines such as Kamarát and Elektrón. After 1989 new artists, the magazine Bublinky and later the Comics Salón festival in Bratislava revived the form, while political cartoonists such as Shooty kept the satirical line alive.

Slovakia in numbers · 01 • 04

22

12

1947

1960s

Artists

Artists from Slovakia in the archive.

Comics from Slovakia in the archive.

Dozorca a väzeň, the earliest comic from Slovakia in the archive.

The decade when the most new comics from Slovakia began.

komiks

komiks · Comics from Slovakia

History

Slovakia in 5 chapters

  1. 1876

    to 1945

    Chapter 01

    Picture stories in humour magazines

    The first Slovak picture stories appeared in the humour magazine Černokňažník, published until 1910, where M. Aleš illustrated several humorous pieces. Similar stories turned up now and then in Dereš (1920), Jež (1922 to 1926) and Kocúr (1919 to 1945).

  2. 1947

    to 1968

    Chapter 02

    Šidlo, Roháč and the first strips

    Jozef Schek's first comic, Dozorca a väzeň, ran in the humour magazine Šidlo in 1947. The satirical weekly Roháč, founded in 1948, became the main home of Slovak strips: Božena Plocháňová drew Bill a Mary there for about 30 years, Viktor Kubal drew Dita, and Schek began Jožinko in 1965. Foreign comic books first appeared at the end of the 1960s.

  3. 1969

    to 1989

    Chapter 03

    Serials in children's magazines

    Comics were seen as a bourgeois genre, and in the 1970s publishing slowed down. Serials ran in Kamarát, such as Jozef Cesnak's Prakovníček and Pavol Moravčík's Kamko a Kamka, and in Elektrón, where Schek drew most of the comics, including science fiction stories written by Kamila Stašková. Jožinko continued in Roháč until 1988.

  4. 1989

    to 2003

    Chapter 04

    Revival after 1989

    A revival began at the end of the 1980s and peaked in the early 1990s, with new artists such as Ladislav Csurma, Juraj Maxon, Danglár, Dušan Blažek, Miroslav Regitko and Milan Dubnický. František Mráz founded the comics magazine Bublinky, which ran from 1990 to 1992 with many scripts by Juraj Šípoš, and in 1993 the group serialized Draculovo oko in the daily Slovenská republika. An association of comics authors was active from 1992 to 1995 and organised the touring exhibition Comics x 5.

  5. 2004

    to today

    Chapter 05

    Festivals, satire and new formats

    The Comics Salón festival, first held in 2004 as the successor of IstroCon, grew into one of the largest pop culture events in Slovakia, with about 12,000 visitors in 2014. Political cartooning stayed strong through Shooty's daily cartoons in SME and Denník N and Rado Ondřejíček's satirical comic collages Cynická obluda, started in 2012.

Essentials

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Essentials

The people to know

Artists

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All 22 artists
Comics

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