The graphic novel’s plot has a nested construction, in which stories multiply swiftly and freely. A man, woken up from a catastrophic dream, finds a diary under his door and begins to read. He learns about someone who set out on a journey to Africa. The ship was sunk by tsunami, but the protagonist survived on a desert island, full of mysteries.
The plot consists of peculiar stories, whose oddness is emphasized by linguistic stylization. The lexical and grammatical composition of texts is intended to evoke associations with pre-war manner of expression and to build an impression of the speaker as someone old-fashioned, from a different era and perceiving the world in a different way. The stylization adds to a specific unreal atmosphere, which justifies the fantastical plot. It also appears to fill banal stories with meaning and significance.
The comic book’s protagonists don’t experience adventures – they only try to surprise each other with a fantastical story full of injuries, strange medical cases and events which belong to the science fiction realm. Certain stories can remind of press articles from the People’s Republic of Poland period. Maciej Sieńczyk puts uses tabloid-like plot in order to reveal grotesque human relationships, the emptiness and nonsense of conversations. Simultaneously, he outlines cultural and social context built of the interwar period and People’s Republic of Poland legacy as well as contemporary consumer society.
A journey into the unknown becomes an excuse to show the contemporary human being, whose life remains unmoved even by a catastrophe (the graphic novel begins with a dream about a comet, while tsunami is a turning point in the plot). Sieńczyk’s characters are imperfect, unable and reluctant to change. On a desert island, they take no actions. They keep telling each other uncanny stories, waiting for yet another wave of fate to throw them elsewhere.
Sieńczyk has a distinctive drawing and storytelling style. It’s a specific collage of comics and illustration; sometimes, text rich in illustration only imitates comics (sequentiality of visual narration, using speech bubbles for text), but soon it evolves into a genuine graphic novel. Such genre-mixing makes the author a unique and distinct figure on the Polish scene.
Sieńczyk draws in a realistic manner, but in a barbarized way. Occasionally, he makes slight mistakes in anatomy, which add extra charm and originality to his stylish images. Backgrounds are reduced to minimum, usually marked with a single colour. The colours are toned down and somewhat detached. They match the fragile drawing style: without overwhelming, they put an emphasis on elements not marked by the contours.
Similarly to previous Sieńczyk’s graphic novels, “Adventures on a Desert Island” evade genre classification: it’s a comic one either loves or hates.
Maciej Sieńczyk
"Przygody na bezludnej wyspie" / “Adventures on a Desert Island”
Wydawnictwo Lampa i Iskra Boża, Warsaw 2012
170 mm x 245 mm, 144 pages
hardcover
ISBN: 978-83-8960-396-8
Author: Łukasz Chmielewski, March 2013, translated by Olga Drenda November 2013