Monday, 19 February 2018

Not A Comic. Not Flemish. Then What The Heck Is it?

I was asked whether I could identify tow comic strips today. The problem is that they were not in English and the person asking thought text was in Flemish.

Here are the 'comic strips'




Although sequential they are not from a comic strip but a calendar and the language is recognisible as Czech so it's from what we used to call the Czech Republica -since 2016 (I think) known as Czechia -the country appears regularly in stats.



The artist was Josef Lada and I quote Lambiek here:

Josef Lada was a Czech painter, illustrator and writer, and is considered one of the founding fathers of Czech comics. Born in the small village of Hrusice, he headed for Prague at the age of 14 to become an apprentice binder. He was a contributor to the satrical magazine Kariktatury and is best known for his illustrations for Jaroslav Hasek's World War I novel 'The Good Soldier Svjek'.

He made 540 sequential black-and-white illustrations in 1923, and added 212 color illustrations in 1953. He also wrote and illustrated the adventures of the talking black cat 'Mikes'. He furthermore painted landscapes and did costume designs for plays and films. The character Švejk had an asteroid named after him in 1995. A year later Josef Lada also had one named after him.

The below is Pražáci na aprovisaci (1917)



This is why I do this blog -finding new artists and creators but also making people aware of those no longer with us such as Lada.

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