comics and propaganda

You can't talk about Russian comics without discussing Bubble. Since its inception in 2011, this little-engine-that-could has grown into the largest comic book publisher in Russia. Shepherded by CEO/publisher Artem Gabrelyanov and editor-in-chief Roman Kotkov, Bubble has a growing stable of titles, and an influence that is only beginning to reach across the Atlantic. ComicsAlliance spoke with Gabrelyanov and Kotkov about censorship, propaganda, and Russia/US relations, and we even got around to talking about comics.

It's been a long, hard road for comic books in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, attempts to build a comics community consistently met with economic hardship, and failed. It's only over the last several years that Western comic books have become a popular medium in Russia, and in that very short time, there have already been three highly publicized incidences of comics censorship.

As Russia and America circle each other in this rapidly evolving Cold War 2.0, combat is waged in multiple theaters: cyber war, spy war, proxy war, cultural war, and an information war fueled by a persistent flow of disinformation and propaganda that hijacks narratives and distorts reality. In this series of articles, John Parker examines the common spaces in the strange Venn diagram where propaganda, culture wars, and information wars intersect with the world of comic books.