Czech Comics: Heartcore

Monday, October 27
11 AM – 12:30 PM
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre Level 3 Room 301 (Peña Room) & Online

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Abstract

Czech artist Štěpánka Jislová’s graphic memoir “Heartcore” is an intense, sobering, at times hilarious deep dive into 21st-century love and relationships — or at least into a lot of things that people call love and relationships. This type of “confessional” comics, though, is a relatively new phenomenon in the Czech scene. In his presentation, Dr. Alaniz will discuss Jislová’s memoir in the context of the recent rise of autobiography in Czech comics.

Speaker Bio

José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published the monographs Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022); and Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature (UPM, 2025). He has also co-edited two essay collections, Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (with Martha Kuhlman, Leuven University Press, 2020) and Uncanny Bodies: Disability and Superhero Comics (with Scott T. Smith, Penn State University Press, 2019). He formerly chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) and was a founding board member of the Comics Studies Society. His published comics and fiction include The Phantom Zone & Other Stories (Amatl Comix, 2020), The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl, 2023), Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023), Tales of Bart: A Novel in Three Acts (2025) and Moscow 93 (2025) (the latter three from FlowerSong Press). His current scholarly projects include a monograph on the representation of historical trauma in Czech graphic narrative.