‘The beginnings of Polish comics date to the middle of the 19th century,’ Traczyk says. ‘Artur Bartels and Franciszek Kostrzewski – we’re talking about 1858, 1859.’
The first serialised picture-story, he reckons, was Ogniem i Mieczem (With Fire & Sword) – the adventures of Szalony Grześ (Crazy Greg). For a long time after that, comics in Poland lived in the press. ‘Comics developed,’ Traczyk says, ‘not dynamically, perhaps – but for many years they were primarily a newspaper form.’
After World War II came socialist realism, which had opinions about what art was for.
Comics under communism developed in a completely different way from comics in Western Europe over the same decades, Machłajewski says – and the word ‘developed’ is doing a lot of work there. Their development was actually obstructed. ‘At first, socialist realism ruled Polish art. There were clear rules about what could and couldn’t be shown.’
Comics weren’t merely discouraged. In that first phase, as he puts it, comics were fought against: the authorities looked on the entire field very unfavourably. The word itself was censored outright (komiks), and publishers reached for substitutes, such as opowieści rysunkowe, drawn stories.
There were, however, two particular teenagers who loved them, no matter what the authorities thought.
Bogusław Polch and Grzegorz Rosiński were both students at the art secondary school in Warsaw, and both of them drew comics, and this got them into serious enough trouble that they were threatened with expulsion if they didn’t stop.
‘Rosiński stopped,’ Machłajewski says. ‘Or at least he stopped showing them off, stopped showing them to teachers. So he managed to finish school.’ He went on to the Academy of Fine Arts, and later had an extraordinary career in Belgium and France. Polch’s schooling story stopped short though: