Ukraine’s emerging comics industry needs support for budding artists
Tetiana Khlon always emphasizes she is a Ukrainian comic artist, but her debut comic book was first published in Russia, not Ukraine.
After seeing her work on the internet, a Russian publisher approached Khlon, ready to print the first issue even before it was complete. In Ukraine, she was able to find a publisher only after the comic became popular in Russia and online.
“To be published in Ukraine, Ukrainian artists first have to prove that readers find them interesting,” Khlon, better known by her alias “Koro,” told the Kyiv Post.
With “Hennadiy the Pigeon,” sketches about the life of that whimsical character in a post-Soviet city, Koro joined the ranks of Ukraine’s comic artists. But while more Ukrainian original comics appear every year, their authors struggle to find recognition and make a living from it.
Meanwhile, comics show trappings of industry in Ukraine: A dozen comics-centered publishers have sprung up, and comic shops have opened in many large cities, a few around the capital Kyiv. Naturally, comics are featured at big comic conventions, but also at book festivals.
Still, people who create original Ukrainian comics feel sidelined in this emerging industry. Their sales are meager compared to sales of licensed translations of popular Western titles. They lack promotion even at comic cons, where costumes, spinoffs and merch take center stage instead of the comics themselves.
“For Ukrainian comics to develop, we need to support the authors, they have to become actual stars,” Koro says. “This will drive the comic culture as a whole.”
First tries
When he was a kid, Sasha Komyakhov was fascinated by stories in pictures and wanted to create his own. But he became a notable book illustrator instead, while comics were something he could only do in his spare time because nobody would publish them in Ukraine.
“Sheer enthusiasm was not enough to make it work, to at least break even,” Komyakhov told the Kyiv Post.
Generations of Ukrainian artists have experienced the same, including during Soviet Ukraine. Only a few were lucky.
One is the Kyiv Post’s own cartoonist Anatoliy Vasylenko, who created some of Ukraine’s first comic strips in the Perets satirical illustrated magazine in 1960s. He still works at 82, and in 2019 his scathing but compassionate comics about the Ukrainian police were published in a separate book called “Bulo Dielo” (“There Was a Case”).
But in Soviet times, comics by Ukrainian cartoonists were rarely published outside their periodicals. Another Perets cartoonist, Oleksandr Mikhnushov, made a comic based on Robert Louis Stevenson‘s “Treasure Island,” but it was never released, Vasylenko recounts. The only other medium for these artists was book illustration.
But even after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, published comics were rare. Some of them include “Buiviter” (1995) by Kostiantyn Sulyma and “Mamai” (1993) by Igor Baranko, both Cossack fantasies and artifacts that were never reissued. Baranko emigrated in 1999 and became a successful comic artist in the West, but in Ukraine, his most famous works were published much later.
“Hennadiy the Pigeon,” an original comic series by Ukrainian Tetiana ‘Koro’ Khlon, is an amusing collection of sketches about the life of that naughty bird in a post-Soviet city. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Comics revolution
Something finally started shifting for Ukrainian comics in 2012, after a new publishing project Nebeskey released “Daogopak,” a reimagining of Cossacks as martial arts heroes. A year later, they published “Chub” by Komyakhov, a Cossack science fiction story in space.
“I drew it as a passion project, without any publication prospects. But Maskym Prosolov (founder of Nebeskey) saw it on the internet and offered to publish,” Komyakhov says.
These first Ukrainian comics publishers were also driven by passion rather than by income prospects. Comics are laborious to draw and costly to print in color, while being faster to read than ordinary books. Naturally, comics need an audience that can appreciate the artwork and is ready to pay extra.
But like in other creative fields, one event boosted the confidence of publishers and support of readers in 2014 — EuroMaidan Revolution, the popular uprising that ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, distanced Ukraine from Russia’s influence and ignited a cultural revival.
“This realization that you can do what you are interested in, the impulse to do it came as the result of the Revolution of Dignity (EuroMaidan) and the societal changes at that time,” comics author and art critic Borys Filonenko told the Kyiv Post.
More comics started to pop up every year, especially since 2017 when Ukraine imposed restrictions on Russian book imports. Ukrainian comics publishers began to earn more by replacing Russian translations of popular Western titles with Ukrainian ones.
“Especially in 2017, when restrictions just came into force and Russian publishers had not yet received import permits, we had six months to take a deep breath,” says Yaroslav Mishenov, director of Vovkulaka comics publishing house, which he founded around a comic shop.
Like other publishers in Ukraine, Vovkulaka sells translations of Western licenses, such as “Hellboy” and “The Witcher” to support their efforts in releasing Ukrainian original comics. But some Ukrainian originals start selling just as well or better, such as Oleksandr Korieshkov’s “Among the Sheep,” a dystopian tale about a wolf fighting a fascist regime of other animals.
Traditional book publishers also set their sights on comics. This month, Komyakhov releases his second graphic novel called “Tato” (“Father”) with Luta Sprava publishing. It’s his reflection on EuroMaidan, where a young female protester has nightmares with premonitions of an upcoming war — Russia’s War Against Ukraine that will be the sequel’s setting.
“It’s a black-and-white graphic novel with a dramatic plot — a serious work that I hope reaches the audience that reads textual literature,” Komyakhov says.
A woman poses for a picture inside the comics as she visits the Comic Con in Kyiv on Sept. 22, 2018. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Lack of promotion
Comics enthusiast Dmytro Danyliuk had collected every Ukrainian original issue, but now there are so many new releases that he does so selectively. For years, he has promoted comic culture at festivals and co-founded Maliopus publishing that released Koro’s “Hennadiy the Pigeon” in Ukraine.
“Comics are released en masse now. Artists who drew only for their drawers see that publishers are more interested and bring out comics that they developed for years,” Danyliuk told the Kyiv Post.
Economic and societal changes that helped Ukrainian comics after EuroMaidan also coincided with the global popularity of superhero movies and video games based on comics, mainly by the U. S. Marvel and DC companies. Fans celebrate this popular culture at a few comic cons in Ukraine, the largest being Comic Con Ukraine.
As the coordinator of the comics zone at Comic Con Ukraine, Danyliuk tries to make sure that the actual origins of this fandom are well-represented and comics gain in popularity among fans of their derivatives, young and old.
But some artists and publishers think it’s not enough. Ukrainian comic cons should give a more prominent role to actual comics and their authors, Koro and Mishenov say. Comic artists from Ukraine and abroad should be the invited stars, not only famous actors and cosplayers.
“Unfortunately, comic cons concentrate on the attributes, not the actual art source,” Mishenov says.
As a result, comic artists and publishers don’t have their own specialized forums, such as the Kyiv Festival of Comics previously organized by Danyliuk until 2019. There is also a lack of media platforms that would popularize and write about comics in Ukraine, Mishenov says.
Comics in Ukraine need that attention because they are not treated seriously, even by the general book industry, artists say. There was some progress at Kyiv’s International Book Arsenal Festival this year, where comics publishers were given a separate wing that highlighted their maturity.
But then at Ukraine’s largest Book Forum Lviv in September, the jury decided not to award the prize in “the Best Comics and Graphical Novels” nomination, citing that eight contenders were not enough to make a decision. The comics community criticized the move, saying that it sets a harmful precedent of ignoring comics as if it’s a medium less important than other books.
To fix the situation, the book forum awarded two special mention prizes to competing comics. One of these went to Filonenko and his co-authors for “U Myati” (“In Mint”), an artsy love story with experimental structure and full of cultural references.
“It’s a problem that U.S. comics also went through,” Filonenko says. “People and institutions there also didn’t treat comics seriously up until Art Spiegelman received a Pulitzer Prize for his ‘Maus’ graphic novel.”
