Anna Krztoń’s comics, although largely autobiographical, serve as a mirror in which a whole generation can look at its reflection. For years, the artist has consistently regaled her readers with excerpts from her life, reminding them that the charm of everydayness lies in small pleasures and in celebrating the moment.
In one of her zines, Anna Krztoń jokes that her readers know her better than she knows herself. In her 13-year-long career, she has made herself known as a tireless autobiographer, a versatile illustrator and even an animator of culture. It is no exaggeration to call her a pillar of Polish independent comics. She was born in 1988 in Tarnowskie Góry, where she had been drawing since childhood. This, as well as her love of literature, made comics her natural medium. Krztoń explained in an interview for the ‘Kusi na Kulturę’ (Tempted by Culture) blog:
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I drew a lot of comic strips in high school with my friends as the main characters. I did the same thing later on at university, this time only as one-panel comics. I’m pretty sure that what I was reading at the time influenced my work – at the time, I was reading a lot of autobiographical comics, particularly Julia Wertz’s [the author of viral autobiographical webcomics, ‘The Fart Party’, among others, ed]. It may sound cliché, but I love observing people around me and catching situations and snippets of conversations and then using them in my comics.
Scenki z życia jej znajomych – udokumentowane na potrzeby zajęć z ilustracji na katowickiej Akademii Sztuk Pięknych (studia na kierunku grafika warsztatowa ukończyła z wyróżnieniem) – stały się podstawą jej pierwszego zina. "Journeys interrupted by life" po raz pierwszy wydane zostały w 2012 roku i, jak twierdzi autorka, "głównie chyba rozeszły się po przyjaciołach".
Personal non-fiction
A defining characteristic of zines is their transience. Limited print runs aimed at a small group of collectors mean that many interesting miniatures go out of print quickly, becoming unattainable to new readers. Granda Publishing House took it upon themselves to ensure that even Anna Krztoń’s oldest comics would be available to readers. Since 2022, under the banner of the Library of Polish Independent Comics, the publishing house has been collecting all of the White Chicken award winner’s independent publications in the ‘Życie i wczasy’ (Life and Holidays) series. [The Polish Independent Comic Book Awards are known as the Golden Chickens; the White Chicken is an independent lifetime achievement award, ed.] Upon setting out on this journey through her oeuvre, I stuck to the trail laid out by this particular collection.
The first volume of ‘Life and Holidays’ is a compilation of comics from 2012–17, while the second volume takes on the years 2017–19. Together, the two form a complementary whole – a record of the formative years of an independent artist. A large number of the collected zines, such as ‘Journeys Interrupted by Life’ mentioned in the introduction, ‘The Kraków Period’ and ‘Interpersonal Relations’, resemble hastily created sketches. Slightly jittery and seemingly sloppy, they successfully mark the transience of the moments captured by the author. As she explains in the introduction to her first album, she is inspired by her friends, acquaintances, family, relationships, travel and other experiences. In a nutshell, everyday life.
In Krztoń’s comics, chats with loved ones or funnier inner dialogues tend to be brought out front and centre. Her pieces are introspective, and although significant moments in history are mentioned (such as Brexit or the death of Michael Jackson), they are, at best, a pretext for a joke or helpful context. An interesting paradox is that every pause, every suspension of plot progress in her stories describes constant movement – literal (journeys, excursions, holidays) and abstract (changes in time).
Even if we stop and look at individual scenes, we don’t have a sense of forward movements – quite the contrary, we feel a firmly rooted permanence in the moment. The broader perspective provided by ‘Life and Holidays’ reveals the entire path travelled by Krztoń, the author and protagonist of her comics.
Although the two albums complement each other, their content is difficult to describe synthetically. This is because it results from an intense search for a creative path, refinement of technique and formal experimentation. The second volume in particular abounds in thematic departures from the autobiographical norm. Examples include surreal stories dedicated to the unusual Pink Dog, Rabbit and Mr Pyramid trio. A similar unreal, fairy-tale and oneiric mood is maintained in the illustrations for the zine ‘31 Days of Autumn’.
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‘Życie i wczasy 2012–2017’ by Anna Krztoń, photo: Granda
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Krztoń takes on a variety of techniques in the pages of ‘Life and Holidays’. She uses colour and black and white; she sometimes opts for crosshatching, and other times she uses rasters. The diversity of these drawings is reflected in the artist’s wide-ranging collection of inspirations, which includes comic strips (the title of the series is ‘Homage to 10-year-old Anna’s favourite comic strip, ‘Życie i czasy Sknerusa McKwacza’ [The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck]), movies (Jim Jarmusch’s name appears several times in the ‘Journeys Interrupted by Life’ dialogues; also, the covers of ‘Szkice z wakacji’ [Sketches from a Holiday] and ‘Relacje międzyludzkie’ [Human Relations] are riffs off posters by Andrzej Klimowski for Jarmusch’s ‘Permanent Vacation’ and ‘Down by Law’) and music (the song ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure accompanies the heroine in the most melancholy scene of the first volume).
Krztoń’s early work has much in common with the moody feel of the Crawley decadents. They share emotional exaggeration and the recurring question of underlying teenage angst about the meaning of life and the complexity of passing, of which the shorts at the end of the second volume of ‘Life and Holidays’ – ‘Jak przetrwać jesienną chandrę’ (How to Survive the Autumn Blues) and ‘Thanatos’ – are good examples. In them, the author tackles her struggle with anxiety and depression (in the first case, in a veiled way; in the second, very straightforwardly). The romantic narrative about the transience of the moment is reinterpreted in the dark miniatures; the maxim carpe diem gives way to memento mori. ‘Reading them today is very unpleasant for me. They’re like a cry for help that I didn’t want to hear at the time’, admitted the author.
Postcards from the edge of the precipice
Depression is a topic that Krztoń comes back to in ‘Weź się w garść’ (Get a Grip), her official debut published by the no longer existing Wydawnictwo Komiksowe (Comics Publishing House). Her autobiographical graphic novel was one of the most talked about titles of 2018. The native of Tarnowskie Góry received an award from the Polskie Stowarzyszenie Komiksowe (Polish Comics Association) for the script. Krztoń discussed the beginnings of her work on the groundbreaking album in a conversation with Jarosław Kowal of the vortal ‘Soundrive’:
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This comic was kind of an ‘accident’. When I started drawing it, and the whole thing starts with a memory of one of our many trips to Częstochowa, I wasn’t planning on creating such an elaborate story. But it was going so well, I didn’t want to stop. And, of course, I quickly understood that the story of my friendship with Asia and Iga had so much more potential than some typical ‘memories from my youth’.
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‘Weź się w garść’ by Anna Krztoń, photo: Wydawnictwo Komiksowe
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Indeed, ‘Get a Grip’ is much more than a cookie-cutter memoir. Krztoń’s debut is a story about the hardships of entering adulthood and the friendships that help overcome its challenges. The comic is set over twelve years: it begins when Anna and her friends Asia and Iga are still teenagers and ends on the threshold of complete independence. During this time, the characters experience their first heartbreaks, clash with hostile school and academic and professional realities and learn to set emotional boundaries. Most significant, however, is the theme of mental disorders casting a shadow over the author’s youth and her loved ones. Krztoń reminisced in an article in the magazine ‘Krytyka Polityczna’:
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I wanted to tell the story, to work through my own traumas, to relive it all and try to get closure for that and for the emotions that went with it. But all that time I kept thinking about some universal value: the possibility that the story might help someone. It was important to me to show that you can overcome depression, even when it seems impossibly terrible. It doesn’t always have to end tragically, even at its worst. It can take six months, two years or more, but you always need someone by your side for support. That person will make it easier to return to everyday life.
One can consider the third volume of ‘Life and Holidays’ to be a postscript to ‘Get a Grip’. The comic strips collected in it were published just after the release of her debut graphic novel and primarily dealt with the period when she was finishing work on it. The author has called this collection one of the most personal publications she has ever created. Whereas in the award-winning debut, the storyline was dominated by the poignant adventures of Krztoń’s friends, it was Krztoń herself, her dilemmas and her problems that came to the fore in the 2019 zine. ‘Idée Fixe’, ‘Zabawa w domek’ (Playing House), ‘Sezon festiwalowy’ (Festival Season), and ‘Rytuały przejścia’ (Rites of Passage) form a tetralogy in which the most significant author of Polish independent comics proves she is better than most at combining comedy with drama.
Most of the scenes in the third part of ‘Life and Holidays’ make you laugh out loud. The Czech ski slopes, the Finnish cottages in Warsaw’s Jazdów as well as comics festivals and fantasy conventions are the settings for the sometimes ribald, sometimes delightful jokes. Once again, the foundation of the mini plotlines is the comic creator’s lampooning interactions with her friends and family, but this time the narrator’s inner turmoil weighs them down. Her grandmother’s life-threatening illness, the breakdown of her relationship and her precarious financial situation loom in the background. ‘So much was going on in my life, it influenced my work. As usual, I tried to cope by drawing things I couldn’t cope with otherwise’, Krztoń confessed. Work on her zines became a form of art therapy. The author’s anxieties, however, are universal, as they are shared by many young adults facing the challenges of capitalist reality.
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‘Życie i wczasy 2017–2019’ by Anna Krztoń, photo: Granda
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By the time the third volume of ‘Life and Holidays’ was in the works, Krztoń’s creative strategy had become apparent. The six-frame layout of the board and the repetitive but not monotonous structure became standard: from the seed of the gag through the funny transition to the punchline. It was then, around 2019, that Krztoń also made self-referentiality the leitmotif of her work. The characters in her zines often sum up a humorous situation by stating that it would make the perfect material for a comic strip. This shift provides the author with an arsenal of refreshing jokes and brings to light that comics are plainly an inextricable part of her original life.
This youth of ours
This historically male-dominated medium has long lacked a female perspective. Anna Krztoń wants to help fill this gap, although she’s by no means the first to do so. The cast of her comics, partly due to their autobiographical nature, is dominated by women and touches on their issues. The female perspective is present not only in her original zines and graphic novels but also in her numerous collaborations. One example is the children’s comic series ‘Karolina i Klara (Karolina and Klara) written by Sebastian Frąckiewicz.
The adventures of the time-travelling Karolina and her best friend, the ferret Klara, have been appearing in the bimonthly magazine ‘Kosmos dla dziewczynek’ (Cosmos for Girls) since 2017 (four years later, a ‘Karolina and Klara’ collection hit bookstore shelves). It is a straightforward herstory comic book in which Frąckiewicz and Krztoń revise the history of Poland and present the profiles of the country’s noteworthy women anecdotally. They include, among others, Wisława Szymborska, Jadwiga Andegaweńska and Maria Konopnicka but also such unfairly overlooked figures as Stefania Wilczyńska or Zofia Chomętowska. Wanda Mężyńska, a ‘Cosmos for Girls’ reader, wrote:
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This comic book shows that these women have often had an uphill battle, or were very tired, or their parents were often against their plans, and despite all of this they did what they did. They never gave up. This comic tells the story of women who are important, not just of men who did something of importance. They didn’t just stand around by their men, somewhere in the background, THEY, too, changed the world.
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‘Domestic fluff’ by Weronika Łodyga & Anna Krztoń, photo: Wydawnictwo kobiece
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Published in 2023, ‘Domestic Fluff’ targets an older audience. Created in collaboration with the author of popular young-adult books Weronika Łodyga, the comic book describes the fate of Magda, a teenager trying to cope with the thought of her dad’s new baby and the fear accompanying a change in the status quo. The value of both comics illustrated by Krztoń lies in providing female readers with female protagonists through whom their issues, doubts and worries are finally being told.
Continued
Anna Krztoń continues to work on original zines. In 2024, she came out with ‘Miniatury’ (Miniatures) and ‘The Swimming Song’, both warmly received. She also illustrated the comic ‘Chciałbym zapomnieć’ (I’d Like to Forget), written by Maciej Cholewiński as part of the ‘Pamięć getta’ (Memory of the Ghetto) project. This historical publication tells the story of Władysław Łąka, a prisoner of Kinder KL Litzmannstadt, a concentration camp for Polish Christian children located within the Łódź ghetto during World War II. This title is far from Krztoń’s usual aesthetic and choice of themes and is yet more proof of the versatility of this ‘Indie queen’.
Selected works:
2024 – ‘Life and Holidays: 2019’
2024 – ‘I’d Like to Forget’ (script by Maciej Cholewiński)
2023 – ‘Domestic Fluff’ (script by Weronika Łodyga)
2023 – ‘Life and Holidays: 2017–2019’
2022 – ‘Life and Holidays: 2012–2017’
2021 – ‘Karolina and Klara: The Medallion of Time’ (script by Sebastian Frąckiewicz and Anna Krztoń)
2018 – ‘Get a Grip’
