ABSTRACT
St. Petersburg’s Varvara Pomidor represent a post-Soviet generation of Russian women comics artists unaffected by their predecessors’ discomfort with the medium due to 20th-century demonisations of it as bourgeois trash. Building on the work of late-Soviet era pioneers like Lena Uzhinova, these artists form a vanguard changing the popular perception of graphic narrative in Russia to something like its acceptance and appreciation in Europe, America, and Asia. In her story/cycle Pravda (2010), Pomidor combines memory fragments, politics, and collage for a confrontation with a troubled national past, through the depiction of a late Soviet-era childhood. Painting on a background made up of clippings from the Communist Party newspaper Pravda (“Truth”), Pomidor counterbalances the ordinary events of her young life and that of her relatives with the grand narrative of history.
