Lilia Diamantopoulou: "Byzantium in Comics", Conference Byzantium and the Modern Imagination: Patterns of the Reception of Byzantium in Modern Culture, Masaryk University Brno, 12-13. September 2018 (original) (raw)

Byzantium in Comics Lilia Diamantopoulou (University of Vienna) In recent years several graphic novels and webcomics have been published treating Byzantine themes ("1453", 2008; "The Hounds of Hell", 2011; "The crown of thorns", 2016), while some months ago there was launched a kickstarter project of an adaptation of Digenis Akritas in the form of a wuxia storytelling, which is a Chinese storytelling form concerning the adventures of martial artists. These comic adaptations offer new ways of looking back to byzantine history and literature, but of course they are not a new phenomenon. Back in the 50ies two periodicals elaborated Byzantine themes in a large scale: Mosaik Verlag in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and Greek Classics Illustrated. In the German periodical, Dig, Dag and the knight Kunkel are travelling throught time and space, going through various adventures in America, the Orient and the Far East, working up with the different facets of the foreign, fighting against injustice, violence and distress. The storytelling is not based on a concrete literary source; it is original with funny elements. At about the same time, the Classics Illustrated were „featuring stories by the world’s greatest authors“. The inclusion of Byzantine themes (for example Constantine the Great, Theodora, Eirene, Eudokia, Konstantinos Palaiologos, Basileios Bulgaroktonos, Irakleios, Byzantine Akrites, etc.) within the series of Greek Classics Illustrated is of particular interest, not only from the perspective of canonisation. Both periodicals tried to offer a new and other perspective to American comics using the form of the comic as a groundbreaking medium, on the one hand to introduce young and reluctand readers to high literature, on the other hand for propaganda reasons. Both series were notably popular and have been reprinted several times in later years. The comparison of the two periodicals permits us to take several questions into consideration: Which recipients were the two periodicals aiming at (children, adults, women) and what was the scope of the issues? Which strategies were used in order to present the byzantine world or to adapt the byzantine literary work to the genre of the comic (e.g. the shortening and linguistic adaptation of the prototype)? Are the periodicals involving antiamerican or leftish alignments and what is the role of Byzantine themes whitin this? These and other questions reveal the relevance of the two periodicals as an object of further research.