The last few years have seen a significant increase in both original and scientific publications on comics. In particular, comics are emerging as a new medium for the popular dissemination of history and memory, often intersecting the genre of docu-journalism. Precisely by this boom in attention from both the media and the public, numerous memory agencies, from Institutions to State Television, have invested in comics to implement official memory policies.
In the field of memory studies, recent works such Comics Memory Archives and Style by A. Maaheen and B. Crucifix (2018) and Documenting Trauma in Comics Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage by D. Davies and C. Rifkind (2020) have shown the multitude of discourses related to memory that have chosen the medium of comics.
The recent anniversary of 1989 saw a rich production of texts (tv. series, film, book, etc) linked to the Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution and Transition. Among these, there are also comic: Ticho 762/Šinkovský's Trikolora ([Tricolours]2019) and Oľhová's Bežna (2019), but the 1989 is also present in Češi 1989 ([The Czechs] Kosatík/Šeda, 2015) and Češi 1992 (Kosatík/Černý, 2014), in Alois Nebel (Rudiš/Jaromir 99, 2011), and Mur ([The Wall] Sis, 2007). If in the comic production about the Protectorate and the Holocaust we find a narrative based on trauma (Drda/Mazel's "The Enormous Disc of the Sun"; Alois Nebel), in that on the socialist period we have a clear distinction between the years of Stalinism (linked to the reconstruction of the memory of subjects and episodes omitted from the official narrative) and the following one. A transversal feature of many publications related to the Velvet revolution and the Transition is the highly instructive-popular nature, manifesting a desire to (re)affirm the official (institutionalized) memory of the period (eg the Češi volumes were co-financed by Česká Televize, the State television). In particular, in the production about the Velvet Revolution we find pre-adolescent protagonists.
The aim is to study the relation between this type of narrator and the reconstruction of the events, and how it relates to the the generation of the narrator (today in their forties) and that of current contemporary adolescent "peers", who have no direct memory of the historical period.
The work aspires to investigate the contemporary Czech and Slovak cultural productions on Velvet Revolution memory in non-serial comics (graphic novel) also through a comparative approach with other transitional contexts, primarily the Spanish one.
