ZfL INFO 87/2026: Eastern Europe in Comics: Perspectives from Within and Beyond

How has Eastern Europe been represented in comics across different historical periods and cultural contexts? Who tells these stories, from which perspective, and for which audiences? How do comics engage with imperial legacies, socialism and post-socialism, war, displacement, memory, and shifting borders?

Comics constitute a significant cultural form that reflects the social, cultural, and political dynamics of different societies. Owing to their hybrid visual-verbal form, they are able to address both historical processes and urgent contemporary realities, including war, violence, displacement, environmental disasters, and global crises. Over time, comics have developed into a versatile medium of documentary storytelling, graphic journalism, testimony, cultural memory, and political commentary.

This workshop aims to present a broad picture of representations of Eastern Europe in graphic narratives. It examines how the region has been visually and narratively constructed from both internal and external perspectives, from earlier European comics to contemporary local and global works. Ukraine serves as one of the central case studies. Special attention is paid to questions of voice, visibility, agency, trauma, cultural memory, and symbolic resistance.

The workshop brings together scholars from sociology, history, art history, literary studies, linguistics, media studies, comics studies, English philology, Ukrainian philology, and Slavic studies. By taking comics as a shared object of research, it creates space for interdisciplinary dialogue on narrative form, visual aesthetics, political representation, social identity, and transnational understandings of Eastern Europe.

The workshop is a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck, the collaborative project Adjustment and Radicalisation. Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe, and Razom for Ukraine. It is supported by the European Union and the State of Tyrol.

Admission is free.

Please register for:

• In-person participation
• Online participation

Program

Thursday, 22 Oct 2026

9.20

• Jürgen Fuchsbauer, Eva Binder, Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck): Welcome Remarks / Introduction

9.40
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 1: Viewing Ukraine: Ongoing War and Nuclear Memory
Chair: Yana Lyapova (University of Innsbruck)

• Gudrun Heidemann (University of Lodz): Ukraine in Focus: Sharp and Blurred Images in Moga Mobo’s Comic Anthology Nothing New in the East (2023)
• Kai Mikkonen (University of Helsinki): Drawing Chernobyl: Comparing Emmanuel Lepage’s Springtime in Chernobyl (Un printemps à Chernobyl, 2012) and Johanna Aulén’s Chernobyl’s Dogs (Tšernobylin koirat, 2022)  (online)                        

11.30
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 2: Mapping Eastern Europe in Comics
Chair: Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck)

• Kees Ribbens (NIOD Institute of War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies): The Least Unfamiliar “Other” or the Most Familiar “Relative”? Conceptualizing Eastern Europe in Dutch and Belgian Comics from the 1930s till the Early 1990s
• Ralf Kauranen (University of Turku): War and Other, Lesser Encounters: Russia/the USSR in Finnish Comics (online)                        

15.00
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 3: Witnessing War: Violence, Trauma, and Visual Narratives
Chair: Matthias Schwartz (ZfL)

• Pramod K. Nayar (University of Hyderabad): Sights, Sounds, Signs and the Story of an Invasion: Igort’s How War Begins (online)
• Constance Uzwyshyn (University of Cambridge): Tardigrade vs. Dragon: Slow Violence, Fast War in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
• Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck): When Comics Teach about War Trauma: Ukrainian Graphic Narratives of Disability
                          

17.30
University Library Exhibition Opening
Venue: Main Library / New Building, Innrain 52f

Do Comics Matter? Featuring literature from the ULB Tirol collection

Friday, 23 Oct 2026

9.30
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 4: Contemporary Ukrainian Malopys / Comics: Trends, War, Horror, and History
Chair: Gernot Howanitz (University of Innsbruck)

• Svitlana Stupak (University of Siegen): Ukraine in Pictures: Mapping out Current Trends in Malopys (CBR)
• Victoria Yefymenko (Taras Sevchenko National University of Kyiv): From Shelter to History: Multimodal Storytelling in A Brief History of a Long War of Ukraine with russia

11.30
Venue: Room 40406, GeiWi-Turm, Innrain 52

Panel 5: Politics of Representation: Memory, Post-Socialism, and War
Chair: Magdalena Kaltseis (University of Innsbruck)

• José Alaniz (University of Washington): Post-Socialist Gothic and Czech Architecture Comics
• Gernot Howanitz (University of Innsbruck): Before Maus, but also after: Ukrainian Visual Holocaust Narratives and the Politics of Representation
• Anastasia Ulanowicz (University of Florida): “Why Do We Need Comics If Russia Is Not in Them?” The Rhetoric of Both-Sideism in Western Comics Representations of the Russia–Ukraine War             

17.00
Venue: Hörsaal 5¾, Geiwi-Turm, Erdgeschoß, Innrain 52e

Discussion and Q&A with Ruslana Koropetska and Bohdan Kordoba
Moderator: Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck)

Publishing Comics in Wartime: What to Publish and How – The UA Comix Case         

18.30               
Closing Remarks

https://www.zfl-berlin.org/event/eastern-europe-in-comics-perspectives-from-within-and-beyond.html