Twilight zones of history: Aleksandar Zograf's Regards from Serbia and the Serbian alternative comics of the 1990s. Issue 5 (3rd September 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Beronja, Vlad
• Is Part Of: Journal of graphic novels & comics. Volume 12:Issue 5(2021)
• Page Start: 667
• Page End: 685
• Publication Date: 2021-09-03
• Subjects: Underground comics -- nationalism -- Serbia -- war -- Walter Benjamin -- dreamwork; Graphic novels -- Periodicals; Comic books, strips, etc -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Periodicals; Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Periodicals; Art, Modern; Comic books, strips, etc; Graphic novels; Popular culture; Comicroman; Comic; Periodicals; 741.5
• DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2020.1741418
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2150-4857

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes Regards from Serbia (2007), a comic strip diary by Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian underground cartoonist, as an instance of the alternative, anti-nationalist oppositional media space during the Yugoslav War. Drawing on comics scholarship and Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, the article explores Zograf's use of the fantastic and surreal aesthetics to depict the political spectacle of Serbian nationalism during the 1990s, a historical time which Zograf imagines as a collective dream or, alternatively, a nightmarish mass hallucination. The visual diary spans the entire decade of the 1990s, a period of war, privation and authoritarian rule in Serbia: from the internationally imposed sanctions in the early 1990s to the overthrow of the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milošević, following the U.S led NATO-bombing campaign. By examining the overall narrative progression of the comics diary and the use of surrealist themes, I view Zograf comics as site of dialectical images that critically reframe both the political rhetoric of Milošević's nationalist regime as well as international mass media representations of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.