One Hundred Years of Polish Comic Books. A Review of Ewa Stańczyk's Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Change in Poland

Abstract

This article is a review of Ewa Stańczyk's monograph entitled Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Change in Poland. The book is a comprehensive and well-documented analysis of the complicated relationship between political power and citizens' pursuit of freedom of thought and entertainment during Poland's over one hundred years of comics history. The research spans the interwar period (1919-1939), communist-era Poland, and the thirty-plus years of democracy. Comics and Nation provides an invaluable perspective on the history of Polish comics, seamlessly linking ideology, politics, economics and pop culture’s pleasures. Stańczyk's meticulous examination of the subject serves as an indispensable reference for foreign scholars, while some of its gaps provide opportunities for future research to expand and enrich the study of Polish comics in the changing landscape of global culture and society.