Culture from the slums: punk rock in East and West Germany

Abstract

popular press assimilated aspects of Western publications and culture once thought corrupting, not entirely unlike the Polish state’s adoption and adaptation of Western values thought to be incompatible with Polish identity. Stańczyk’s engaging defence of Polish comics concludes that “[c]omics and debates surrounding comics have featured prominently in the reconfiguration of the nation as [. . .] interrelated categories of citizenship, state building, and personal/ collective identity have all played a role in these processes” (166). Comics studies do not appeal to all readers and may be alienating to those unfamiliar with the discipline and its source material. Stańczyk avoids this problem. As much as the book is an analysis of Polish comics culture, it is a history of the Polish state and a study of its people, particularly children, and culture. Grounding the history of Polish comics within that of the nation itself, Stańczyk points to the relative indivisibility of popular culture and national identity. In addition, Stańczyk foregrounds transnational influences concurrently shaping Poland and Polish comics since the First World War despite (or in spite) of domestic politics and culture. Of course, comics were not responsible for the Communist regime or the collapse of that regime in the late 1980s. Nor does Stańczyk make such a claim. But comics, both foreign and domestic, influenced the politics of those periods and helped shape Polish society. Comics and Nation capably demonstrates Polish fears of cultural invasion, corruption, and antiAmericanism through comics even as foreign comics and manga spawned domestic imitators that became cultural touchstones of the emerging Polish nation and comic book scene.