As always, stay tuned here on [email protected] for a slow trickle out of Jucika comics, but if you want to find more, here’s a good post with a large collection that /u/[email protected] posted last year: https://piefed.social/post/1258520
**Also, check out some Jucika fan art! https://piefed.social/c/eurographicnovels/p/2128207/the-best-of-jucika-fan-art-12-pieces-with-two-videos
**You can find more Jucika content in c/graphicnovels by using this search
Intent doesn’t really matter. What matters is what the comic actually does. Whatever the author does in other strips is immaterial.
As a comics producer, intent is always involved. Strips don’t just magically invent themselves. There’s always a design process, and it’s usually a lengthy, borderline-stumbling process at that.
There’s almost always some relationship, and I for one find it fascinating. Sometimes it’s very adjacent stuff, and sometimes it can be wildly different. Again, fascinating to me.
The question, “What did the author intend?” is largely unanswerable and subjective, but “How does this comic operate? What does it actually do?” is objective and discoverable.
We’ve stumbled into an old literary criticism debate on the death of the author. Feel free to look into it. Lindsay Ellis has a good video on its origin and its current state of play.
How the comic operates is dependent on society at the time of release, and therefor might not be visible for a modern spectator without commiting to intense research into society during that timeframe.
The idea that the author’s intentions are unknowable but that the effect on the reader is somehow objective seems crazy to me.
“The effect on the reader” is also, of course, subjective, but we have as a starting point the comic itself, aka, objective reality. Reader response criticism gets into all the details of that.
I was also thinking you wouldn’t be looking so much at an individual comic, as the whole series, maybe dividing into things like categories. So, how many of these comics operate on the implied horniness of men? Right, like, I don’t think that’s a crazy thing to intuit in these comics without the mind-reading powers of Mesmer.
Now there IS interesting stuff about the culture–being right after all the political shennanigans, censorship, etc., that I would have to look outside the text for, but it could be an interesting experience.
As for the author’s intent, it is indeed unknowable, or at least you’ll never know if you’ve known it. Science has shown that people’s unconscious will decide for them, and then their conscious will COME UP WITH A REASON regardless of the true motivation. An example is cutting the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. You can instruct one half of the brain to pick up an object, independent of the verbal half of the brain, and the person will almost always come up with a plausible reason for them having selected that object. The stated intent has as much value as an AI hallucination.
Fair enough, but as someone who’s been immersed in the comics and arts process for a long time, I can’t say that a philosophical proposition / debate on the process of intent interests me overmuch. People who want to can debate that all they want, and note that “intent” was your statement, not mine.
In my expanded comment (the linked post) I was moreso getting in to specific ideas, admittedly without knowing much about the author’s life & process, leaving the comment --YES-- speculative, and even a bit philosophical, not unlike a puzzle to unravel. And I happen to enjoy puzzles. With other comics creators, I know vastly more about what their process, ideas and intentions were.
With my own art pieces, many of them reach a sort of unfinished state in which I get a bit stumped about what I’m really trying to go for. I usually need either a bit of inspiration, a new idea, or a more cognitive process in which I attempt to figure that out. In fact I view the whole creation process as being informed by multiple thoughts, techniques, and experiments. But I’m something of a weird artist who gets bored quickly and likes to move on after a couple studies. Others will stay in one genre / set of styles and just hone away on them. But I digress…
I’m a horribly uncreative person myself, but I do find it partially delusional how so many creative people take ownership of their entire process. I feel like a lot of that stuff happens subconsciously and it’s more like having a waking dream than designing a bridge.
That’s why I itch when people discuss intent (whether or not they use the word): because even the authors stated intent might be truly authoritative. That is to say, if someone lives in a sexist society, and derives a sexist plotline, then they can’t wiggle out of it by saying, “I didn’t intend to be sexist” or “But I’m absolutely not sexist!” In today’s Twitter-connected culture, people bypass reading the text and just read the authors tweet; that’s how the Matrix was established as an undisputed trans allegory you have to be mentally deficient not to recognize.
But if I were a creative person, I think I’d be more interested in how the art worked independently of the author, though certainly it would be fun to see how an authors work develops. I would ALSO be interested in the author’s creative process, but it would be based around how different processes create different work.
Edit: And, I would, I admit, if I had an attraction to an author, use the work to try to understand them better … but that’s a tertiary concern for the public.
Toxic social media aspects FTW! :D
Well, I agree with you that the creation process is indeed somewhat mysterious, and indeed subconsciously inspired. And childrens’ art is some of my favorite art.
On the comics side, I’ve learned almost universally that design, intent, craftsmanship and similar are almost exclusively the working method. One of the articles that I’ve perpetually been meaning to get out the door is about how George Gately went about it, the originator of Heathcliff. Inspiration would play a part for him, yes, but it was also a torturous process, trying to top his previous work and needing to produce ~6 comics a week. My hat’s certainly off to folks like that, but it would probably drive me mad.
Actually intent matters a lot, but tends gets lost over the decades. These strips all come around as light-hearted, showing a positive worldview where people are nice to each other and the minor villains that exist get whatever minor revenge they deserve.
Taken what i know about Hungary after WW2, this was probably the most “inciting” thing the artist was able to make without getting into the crosshairs of the authorities. It still emphasizes standing up for one another, helping each other out, to enjoy life and also that women have every right to be self-determined. These aren’t “revolutionary” themes (outside of the “feminism-light”, which is concealed as light-hearted humor), buy they still stand for social coherence, mutual help and a bright future.
Yeah, I believe the Hungarian Revolution of just the year before Jucika was created (1957) was hugely influential. In some ways obvious, and in some ways not.