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Yeah, that’s right: I flip through foreign-language magazines looking for the comics. This is from a bookmark tucked away in a recent issue of Snob, a Russian-language lifestyle glossy which I’m told is common to newsstands in the NYC area, presumably given an especially liberal construction to “area” in that I’m three and a half hours away by train. As you can see, it’s an installment of John Deering’s Strange Brew, initially reading “It really tortured my soul to create this one…” Since I cannot read Russian, I don’t know if the same joke is being communicated presently, or if some advertising or Russian lifestyle-related jest has been covertly substituted, but I think all of us can agree, nonetheless, that making fun of gallery art and artists is as potentially universal a language as has yet been conceived.

Er, let’s get right to the release list:

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In 2005, I went to Russia, and my husband and I decided we would look for Russian comics while we were there. I tried asking in bookstores, but the clerks all gave me a funny look and said no. We finally found a few random copies of something called 2002, which looks pretty terrible, but no stores carried anything that approximated what you’d find at bookstores in the US (that said, our chain bookstores—Border’s, Barnes & Noble—have shit selection of anything other than Marvel and DC collections). Just lately, I started reading José Alaniz’s Komiks, which is the first study of the form in Russia. (It was published by the University of Mississippi Press, which—side note—has a great catalog of comics criticism, including books by Charles Hatfield, Joseph Witek, and CC’s own Jeet Heer.) So I started digging around on the interwebs for some translated materials, but again, there’s not much. There seems to be plenty of creating going on in Russia (there are now two international festivals: BoomFest in St. Petersburg, and KomMissia in Moscow), but it’s hard to tell how much of the work is any good. My guess is that the brilliant-to-crap ratio is probably the same as it is in the West. So here’s a slightly random selection of some work in translation and some that’s not. (more…)