By the end of 1960, for the purposes of another popular children’s magazine, Świerszczyk (The Little Cricket), Butenko created new characters: a hippo called Gucio and a dog called Cezar. Sloppy Gucio and prudent Cezar love to have fun and travel a lot and they always try to help those in need. Their imagination is so fertile that they always have extraordinary adventures, even in the kitchen or the garden. Gucio and Cezar’s adventures were published several times (even as recently as 2011, compiled into a single book). A TV series of bedtime stories using puppets was also developed, based on Butenko’s comic books.
Finally came Kwapiszon, addressed to slightly older readers, who is main character of a comic series published by Nasza Księgarnia between 1976 and 1981. Kwapiszon is a Varsovian, a scout and a keen fisherman. Finding a magic jewellery box gets him into trouble - two dangerous thieves, Faworyt and Kompan constantly chase him trying to steal it. Kwapiszon’s series is distinguished by its unusual technique. Comic boards consisting of black-and-white photos and photomontages are used as backgrounds for Butenko’s drawings. Even though characters lines are very terse, the author successfully inserted some didactic values, which are to be read between the lines, and are related to Polish history, historical sites and figures.
Butenko's Style
The way Butenko draws is very characteristic and reminiscent of children’s drawings – characters are flat, simplified as much as possible, drawn with a single thick line, and mostly shown in profile. Characters’ dialogue is not shown in speech bubbles but instead a dotted line from quote to character denotes the speaker. No other cartoonist has such an original way of introducing dialogues – says Tomasz Marciniak in his work 'Bohdan Butenko i iego twórczość' (Bohdan Butenko and his Works).
Alongside authors like Daniel Mróz, Janusz Stanny, Jan Marcin Szancer, Franciszek Themerson and Józef Wilkoń, he earned the status of ‘classic of the genre’, while his projects aesthetically educate a third consecutive generation, being a major influence for young illustrators. Butenko was an extremely conscientious artist who turned printing into an art form. While developing each tome he took care of everything: from cover to imprint, comparing the creative process to the knitting of a sweater. As he said: ‘You need to knit so that it does not come undone’. Thanks to his aesthetic sense and obsession with details each of Butenko’s book is a true piece of art where each element co-creates a multilevel plastic narration. – as written by Anna Bargiel i Jakub Woynarowski in a foreword to an exhibition organised in Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków in 2013.