Anthropos 56 (1): 171–195 | issn0587-5161 | e-issn 2630-4082
Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel:
(After)Lives of a Czechoslovak
Anti-Normalisation Superheroine
Robin R. Mudry
Leipzig University, Germany
robin.mudry@egs.edu
© 2024 Robin R. Mudry
Abstract. This paper presents a symptomatic rereading of four of Kája
Saudek and Miloš Macourek’s collaborative works around the female
double-heroine ofMuriel/Jessie through the lens of critical theory. The
film Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (Kdo chce zabít Jessii?) (Vorlíček 1966),
the two first and only existing episodes of the Muriel comics series
Muriel and the Angels (Muriel a andělé) (Saudek and Macourek 1991)
and Muriel and the Orange Death (Muriel a oranžová smrt) (Saudek
and Macourek 2009), as well as the comics-comedy Four Murders Are
Enough, Darling (Čtyři vraždy stačí, drahoušku) (Lipský 1971) are con-
ceived of as intermedially connected and socio-politically relevant to
date. By analysing in particular the political context in which these
works were created and extrapolating the underlying, yet often ironic
critique of ideology inherent to them, the present study for the first
time methodologically foregrounds their investigation along political
and ideological lines. Special attention is paid to the counterfactual
openings and the political imagination at work that can be designated
as communist utopian. The paper thus aims at demonstrating that it
is not enough to praise the import of American-style imagery, or the
comic genre itself, into theCzechoslovak pop culture of the 1960s, if we
are to grasp the continuing significance of one of its most famous su-
perheroines (Muriel/Jessie) and creative duos (Saudek andMacourek).
Key Words: Czechoslovak comics, communist comics, Czechoslovak
film, post-socialism, communist utopia, ideology critique, counterfac-
tual narratives, female comic heroes, comics-comedy
Muriel Saudeka in Macoureka: (po)življenja češkoslovaške
protinormalizacijske superjunakinje
Povzetek.Članek podaja simptomatično ponovno branje štirih del Káje
Saudeka in Miloša Macoureka o dvojni junakinji Muriel/Jessie skozi
lečo kritične teorije. O filmu Kdo hoče ubiti Jessie? (Kdo chce zabít
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.56.171-195
Robin R. Mudry
Jessii?) (Vorlíček 1966), dveh prvih in edinih obstoječih epizodah se-
rije stripov o Muriel – Muriel in angeli (Muriel a andělé) (Saudek and
Macourek 1991) ter Muriel in oranžna smrt (Muriel a oranžová smrt)
(Saudek andMacourek 2009) – ter stripovski komediji Štirje umori so
dovolj, draga (Čtyři vraždy stačí, drahoušku) (Lipský 1971) razmišljamo
kot o intermedialno povezanih ter še danes družbenopolitično relevan-
tnih. Z analizo političnega konteksta, v katerem so bila ta dela ustvar-
jena, in ekstrapolacijo temeljne, a pogosto ironične kritike ideologije,
ki je v njih inherentna, pričujoča študija prvič metodološko postavlja v
ospredje raziskovanje avtorjev v politični in ideološki smeri. Posebna
pozornost je namenjena protidejstvenim vrzelim in politični imagina-
ciji na delu, ki jo lahko označimo za komunističnoutopično. Članek
tako želi pokazati, da ni dovolj samo hvaliti uvoza podob v ameriškem
slogu ali stripovskega žanra nasploh v češkoslovaško pop kulturo šest-
desetih let prejšnjega stoletja, če hočemo razumeti trajni pomen ene
njenih najbolj znanih superjunakinj (Muriel/Jessie) in ustvarjalne dvo-
jice (Saudek in Macourek).
Ključne besede: češkoslovaški strip, komunistični strip, češkoslovaški
film, postsocializem, komunistična utopija, kritika ideologije, protidej-
stvene pripovedi, stripovske junakinje, stripovska komedija
A Strange Fairytale
In the short text ‘Podivná pohádka’ (A Strange Fairytale) (Saudek 1991),
which oscillates between preface and prologue, Kája (Karel) Saudek,
probably the best-knownCzech comics illustrator, retraced the peripeties
of the convoluted and much deferred publication history of his Muriel
and the Angels (Muriel a andělé) (Saudek andMacourek 1991). Ever since
1969, when Saudek, together with the scenarist MilošMacourek, planned
a series of twelve graphic novels narrating the adventures of the young,
smart and extremely attractive physician Muriel, the first episode had
been waiting in the drawers of Mladá fronta.¹ It eventually saw the light
of day on the Czechoslovak book market in 1991, only to become one of
the author’s most appraised comic strips. A Strange Fairytale amounts
to a comico-cinematographical note where Saudek’s hopeful race to the
editorial office not only transpires the spirit of the just kicked-off Velvet
¹ Founded in 1945, Mladá fronta (The Young Front), was one of the most important pub-
lishing companies in post-war Czechoslovakia. As with any other publisher, it was sub-
jected to state censorship in varying degrees throughout communist dictatorship. After
a turbulent, and later much criticised, privatisation in the 1990s, the publishing house
ceased to exist in 2021.
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Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
Revolution, but also textually evokes comic bubbles – ‘Uf! Gasp!’ (1991,
2). Saudek hadmade it to the office just in time, yet without achieving any
publishing perspective. In the same vein, a couple of (seemingly rhetor-
ical) questions and exclamations are addressed to the readership of an
unsteady ‘post-revolutionary’ time which appeared to have only little in
common with the equally uncertain moments of the Prague Spring and
its disillusioning aftermath two decades earlier.² That is to say, also with
the moment when Muriel and her fantastically utopian multi-temporal
world were born. Remembering that context of hopeful change, Saudek
asked ‘Would all of this [the crazy genesis ofMuriel in the liberated mo-
mentum of 1968] still be true today, in a time of videos, devoid of ideas
and inflationary in about every sense?’ (1991, 1, emphasis added).³
It is precisely this presumed lack of ideas that stands in stark contrast
with the political imagination and audacity of Saudek and Macourek’s
erstwhile Muriel story. A story full of scathing socio-political and ide-
ological criticism, unfolding both on the level of its scenario, including
interplanetary journeys, time travel and alternate history (Macourek), as
well as on the level of its visual execution full of irony, intericonic and in-
termedial citations and Western, mostly American, references (Saudek).
Muriel’s universe includes versions of a different utopian futurewhere the
idea of communism seems to have been fully realised (Muriel and theAn-
gels) aswell as a scenario of how such a historical trajectory could be ham-
pered by the invasion of orange monsters, which bears strikingly anal-
ogous resemblances to the 1968 Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslo-
vakia (Muriel and the Orange Death). Even in the face of outspoken cen-
sorship and the sweeping political shifts that stifled the country’s spring-
time awakening and converted it into the depoliticised apathy of the so-
called ‘normalisation’ – both of which rendered regular publication of the
first two and only existing Muriel episodes impossible – Saudek would
find ways to smuggle Muriel into other media he was working on, such
²Whereas the Velvet Revolution of 1989 quickly ushered in the demise of Czechoslovak
state socialism and subsequently led to the splitting of the Czech Republic and Slovakia,
the Prague Spring of 1968 had aimed at realising ‘socialism with a human face,’ but was
soon crushed by a Soviet invasion. The years following the end of the Prague Spring are
commonly designated as ‘normalisation.’ The term is problematic in itself as it reproduces
the reactionary perspective of the occupier since what had to be normalised were the
reformist tendencies of 1968 deemed too liberal.
³ ‘Platilo by tohle vše ještě dnes, v době videí, žádných idejí a inflace všeho?’ (Saudek 1991,
1, emphasis added); all translations from Czech are by the author.
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Robin R. Mudry
as the feature-length comics-comedy Four Murders Are Enough, Darling
and the movie poster of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) for Czechoslo-
vak distribution (Diesing 2013, 278, 374–375). Thus, a lack of ideas and,
especially, political imagination would be the last things that come to
mind to characterise Saudek and Macourek’s work. It comes as a strik-
ing sign of foreclosure, then, that exactly such a fear is uttered in the face
of the ‘democratic transition’ and ‘economic transformation’ Czechoslo-
vakia was about to undergo in the 1990s (Offe 1991) and, moreover, as
history seemed to have ended (Fukuyama 2006) and the new uni-polar
world rid itself of any alternative utopias. In what follows, this fear will be
read as a symptom for the unrealised utopias whose loss we continue to
mourn in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Comics and Politics
The current paper proposes a (re)reading of Saudek and Macourek’s
Muriel and her multiple lives by politically and ideologically contextual-
ising them and, thus, opening a perspective of comics studies that, in the
‘post-socialist’ predicament of Central Europe, has been widely neglected
for the benefit of mostly depoliticised chronological and positivistic ac-
counts (Kořínek 2010; Pospiszyl 2015). These hitherto prevalent method-
ological choices symptomatically indicate the ongoing failure to grasp
the discrepancy between ‘actually existing socialism (a later expression)’
(Jameson 2017, 269) on the one hand and a utopian communism on the
other, the latter being far from absent in Saudek’s comics. For instance,
Tomáš Pospiszyl attests to themost ambitious project thus far ofmapping
the History of Czechoslovak Comics in the 20th Century (Prokůpek et
al. 2014) and the effort to go beyond ‘the creation of a detailed factogra-
phy lacking necessary interpretation,’ only to ascertain the adjournment
of a more theoretical approach (Pospiszyl 2015, 767). In his review of
the most extensive monograph on Saudek to date (Diesing 2013), Pavel
Kořínek (2010, 685) goes so far as to conclude that, ‘[u]nfortunately, the
accompanying text could not shift away from elementary descriptive-
ness.’ In ‘Comics, Comics Studies and Political Science,’ Kent Worcester,
himself a political scientist and co-editor of A Comics Studies Reader
(Heer and Worcester 2009), more generally states that ‘[t]o date, schol-
ars of comics have done a better job of analyzing individual narratives,
and recovering the lives and works of past cartoonists, than of finding
ways to measure the social, political, and economic impact of comics
and cartoons’ (Worcester 2017, 692). Furthermore, such assessments not
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Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
only hold true with regard to secondary literature, but can also be ap-
plied to the presentation of comics in an exhibition context. When I first
researched this paper in 2023, there were altogether three distinct shows
on display in the Czech Republic where the work of Kája Saudek in gen-
eral andMuriel in particular prominently featured. Whereas one Prague
exhibition at the Dancing House Gallery was completely monographic,
the shows at the Western Bohemian Gallery in Plzeň and the Moravian
Museum in Brno focused on genealogies and authoritatively displayed
the work of Saudek in his capacity as ‘the king of Czech comics’⁴ (Galerie
Tančící dům 2022; Moravské zemské muzeum 2022; Bendová and Šla-
jch 2022).⁵ However, Muriel and the Angels were reduced to pop icons,
superheroes and fantastic creations without any emancipatory potential.
Their visual qualities were preferred to narratological or utopian ones
where the protagonists’ features were reduced to iconographic innova-
tion and their main strength perceived in the import of Western pop
culture syntax. Finally, in the introduction to Comics and Ideology – the
very first book to directly link comics with questions of ideology⁶ – the
editors laconically observe that ‘[c]ertainly much research about comics
has focused on elements other than ideological’ (McAllister, Sewell, and
Gordon 2001, 3). Pointing out both comics’ formal specificities and so-
cial significance (2001, 3–4), they go on to formulate two questions: ‘Why
⁴ It is not only in light of the collective background of the creations here examined – all of
them emerged in cooperation with Miloš Macourek as scenarist and others with regard
to the motion pictures – that we abstain from the ex post designation of Saudek as ‘the
king of Czech comics’ (‘král českého komiksu’). Furthermore, such a title does not re-
flect the historical reality of the Czechoslovak state, given the importance of Slovakia as a
publication site, especially in Technické noviny (Technical News), when printing Saudek’s
comics in the Czech half of the state had become increasingly difficult throughout the
1970s (Prokůpek 2014a, 570; 2014e, 657). It is, in the geographical context of this journal,
noteworthy that, in 1971, Saudekmanaged to publish a double-page spread comic strip on
Jan Hus as the founder of the Czech reformation (‘Jan Hus – osnivač češke reformacije’)
in issue no. 37 of the Croatian youth magazine Sve oko nas (Prokůpek 2014a, 569; Diesing
2013, 322–323).
⁵The exhibition in Plzeň was entitled Linky komiksu (The Lines of Comics) which, how-
ever, were based on associative conjectures rather than historiographical genealogies and
did not really take into account the lines singled out in the History of Czechoslovak
Comics in the 20thCentury (Prokůpek et al. 2014; Schmarc 2015, 773). Yet, both genealog-
ical approaches attribute one specific ‘line’ to Kája Saudek and his stylistic followers.
⁶We subscribe to the understanding of ideology as ‘a theory of [sic] which is necessary for
an understanding of constituted interests within systems of representation’ (Spivak 1999,
252).
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and how may comics challenge and/or perpetuate power differences in
society? Do comics serve to celebrate and legitimize dominant values and
institutions in society, or do they critique and subvert the status quo?’ (p.
2). These queries are of equal importance to the present endeavour, as
we shall examine both Saudek’s particular use of American-style comic
features to subvert and ironise the official discourse on comics of 1950s
and 60s Czechoslovakia as well as the (lack of) reception of Muriel in the
early 1970s and then again after the demise of the state socialist regime.
Let us return, for a last time, toWorcester’s review on comics and polit-
ical science in order to further pin down our methodological approach.
The author continues by broadly distinguishing ‘three very different ap-
proaches to the challenge of mapping the relationship of politics and
comics’ (Worcester 2017, 692). First, area studiesmost often group comics
along geographical lines – e.g. A History of Czechoslovak Comics in the
20th Century – and enable comparatist perspectives. Second, there is a
more theoretical approach aimed at applying the methodological tools
developed by social theory as well as postcolonial and cultural studies
to graphic narratives in order to identify how power relations and cul-
tural struggles are negotiated, yet oftenwithout touching upon themedial
specificities of the comics form. A third approach finally consists in tak-
ing formal considerations of the comic genre more seriously into consid-
eration and exploring its unique possibilities of pictorial, spatiotemporal
and medial rendering of (political) narratives. It elaborates ‘the medium’s
capacities, advantages, and liabilities when it comes to presenting politi-
cal material’ (p. 693). Even though such an approach has been associated
with the comic journalism of Joe Sacco and its engagement with history,
it turns out to be equally useful for older comics, especially when they
closely interacted with other media (such as film) and enacted the con-
cept of time and interplanetary travel – a particular form of the ‘abrupt
shifts in chronological and spatial location’ that ‘comics tend to comfort-
ably accommodate’ (p. 698).
While it would make no sense to dogmatically uphold Worcester’s
threefold distinction, it is mostly the third approach, with some alle-
giances to social theory questions, that best underpins my own revisiting
of Macourek and Saudek’s work. This quest is, however, also a visit tout
court as Saudek’s comics have to this date mostly been analysed from
the perspective of area studies. Moreover, they have frequently been
framed along black-and-white anti-communist narratives, according to
which we would have had to partake in the following trajectory. First,
the artist’s early private works remained secluded from a wider audience,
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given Saudek’s ‘bourgeois’ class background. Second, his public produc-
tivity finally gained some traction under the impression of Prague Spring
liberalisation tendencies in the late 1960s, only to be crushed by Soviet-
imposed censorship in the course of the so-called ‘normalisation’ period,
i.e. after Czechoslovak society had gone too far in its quest for ‘socialism
with a human face.’ Finally, Saudek’s work could be published after com-
munist dictatorship ended, albeit the ‘wild 1990s’ with their uncontrolled
deregulation and rise in criminal activities would bring along tedious
legal and editorial struggles that only gradually enabled the author and,
after his 2015 death, his family to recover the abducted or missing comic
panels for an eventually wider publication (Diesing 2013, 269).⁷ How-
ever, the regime’s relationship to the comic genre had become far more
nuanced (Foret 2014, 550–554) and Saudek turned out to be a proficient
visual contrabandist. As for the publishing turmoil, it was Mladá fronta
which refused to publish Muriel and the Angels after 1989 because of an
alleged lack of profitability (Saudek 1991, 2).
Despite the consistent censorship and marginalisation of his work by
the Czechoslovak state authorities in the 1970s and 80s, we will also ar-
gue that the artist-cum-author’s relationship to communism as a promise
(Derrida 1994, 74) was far more complex than the often too quickly as-
sumed straightforward opposition. Our preliminary thesis would there-
fore be that it isMuriel’s status of ambivalent superheroine who is fight-
ing for peace and universalist ideals, as well as Saudek’s untimely ap-
propriation of American comics visuality and prototypes, that seem to
have made this compound of work so apt of subversion. In what follows,
we will moreover focus on the strategies of intericonicity and interme-
diality, interconnecting both comic strips among themselves and with
movies. Also, the use of counterfactual narratives will be taken into ac-
count. As the editors of a recent anthology on Counterfactual Narrations
andCulture of Remembrance (Nicolosi, Obermayr, andWeller 2019, 3–6)
⁷This line of historico-biographical interpretation, further underpinned by the biological
metaphor of awakening, heyday and decline, can be easily followed by taking a look at
the titles of the chapters dedicated to Saudek in A History of Czechoslovak Comics in
the 20th Century: Saudek’s Belated Debut (‘Saudkův opožděný debut’), Searching for an
Emergency Exit [from censorship] (‘Hledání únikového východu’), A Light at the End of
the Cave [Saudek was drawing for the Czech Speleological Society in the 1980s] (‘Světlo
na konci jeskyně’), Out of the World of Stalactites (‘Ven ze světa krápníků’), A Somehow
Unhappy Happy End (‘Poněkud nešťastný happy end’), Saudek Is Leaving (‘Saudkovo
odcházení’) (Prokůpek 2014d, 467–472; 2014a, 565–570; 2014e, 653–657; 2014f, 739–742;
2014b, 832–837; 2014c, 914–917).
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Robin R. Mudry
pointed out, every counterfactual project is always also an intervention
in time and expresses a desire to have the present changed by altering
the course of history at a decisive point of bifurcation, i.e. a moment
(nexus) in time where events turned out differently from how history had
recorded them: a retroactive opening (alsoMorson 2003). Hence, Saudek
was juggling with official discourses on the trajectory towards commu-
nism and, at the same time, appropriating the motif of a technological
race towards the conquest of spacemuch popularised by Soviet discourse
(Schaber 2019). Eventually, it was the control over time as frequently dis-
played in contemporary sci-fi films and especially in comedies succeed-
ing the Czechoslovak Nouvelle Vague cinema in the early 1970s that was
at stake (Selingerová 2016). In pursuing these lines, we will focus on four
of Saudek’s works associated with or directly featuring what we call an
‘anti-normalisation superheroine.’ These are, in chronological order, the
filmWhoWants to Kill Jessie? (Kdo chce zabít Jessii?) (Vorlíček 1966), the
two first and only existing episodes of the Muriel series – Muriel and the
Angels (Muriel a andělé) in 1969 (Saudek andMacourek 1991) andMuriel
and the Orange Death (Muriel a oranžová smrt) in 1970 (Saudek andMa-
courek 2009) – and finally the comics-comedy FourMurders Are Enough,
Darling (Čtyři vraždy stačí, drahoušku) (Lipský 1971).
Whoever Wants to Kill Jessie Is Denying Freedom to the Dreams
Although the movie scenarist Miloš Macourek and the comics illustrator
Kája Saudek had known each other since 1960, it was only in the second
half of the decade that their joint work would intensify and yield fruits.
Together with filmmaker VáclavVorlíček, who initially had the idea to in-
troduce comic characters into a film strip (2004, 94), they came up with
a complete formal and genre novelty.WhoWants to Kill Jessie? consisted
in the conflation of film and comics for the first time in Czechoslovak
cinematography (Vacovská 2016, 105–106, 110). The use of ‘a unique spa-
tial grammar of gutters, grids, and panels’ (Chute 2016, 4) in a motion
picture included not only the interjection of comic strips in the open-
ing credits of the film and the dreams of the male anti-hero, engineer
Jindřich Beránek, but also integrated speech bubbles into the very film
once the comic strip’s protagonists had exited the world of dreams.⁸ Sig-
⁸There is a whole history of how speech bubbles fought their way intoCzech comics, which
is echoed by the trouble Macourek and Vorlíček encountered upon introducing comics
and their bubbles into film (Kořínek and Prokůpek 2014a; Vorlíček 2004).
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Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
nificantly, we have to deal with the breakup of the, albeit always fuzzy,
boundaries between dreamlands and reality. Jindřich’s tyrannical wife –
docent⁹ Beránková whom we could describe as a ruthless careerist loyal
to the interests of a state-owned positivist science – had successfully de-
veloped a technology by means of which the subject’s dreams could be
optimised.
Upon application, nightmares and disturbing elements in the oneiric
realm are supplanted by what are deemed to be pleasant and uplifting re-
placements in order to optimise the day-time labour productivity of the
worker. The work of dreams (Freud’s Traumarbeit) is taken over by the
state and its ideologists who effectively undertake the displacement of ob-
jects (Verschiebung). There is only one catch, namely that the undesirable
elements which make up our agitated nightmares escape from these only
to enter reality and cause even more terror.¹⁰ It is tempting, following
Slavoj Žižek (Fiennes 2012), to read this kind of experiment not only as
an ideology critique of the communist dictatorship aiming at controlling
the dreams of its subjects, but also as a meta-medial critique of cinema
as the suprememachine of dreams itself, an aspect going well beyond the
bipolar world view of the ColdWar. That the end of such bipolarity would
not automatically lead to a utopian state of peace was very clear to Ma-
courek and Saudek, as is demonstrated by the peripeties of their Muriel
story where only time travel and interplanetary journeys with their in-
terventions in history pave the way for a truly anarchic and peaceful
future.
Jessie is an extremely good-looking blonde female heroine played by
Saudek’s earlier love Olga Schoberová, whom engineer Jindřich encoun-
tered in the comic strip episode of the fictitious journal Svět techniky
(World of Technics) and who then appears in his dreams. The fact that
she is an inventor herself precisely does not identify her with the dogma-
tist docent Beránková. On the contrary, she is trying to save her inven-
tion – anti-gravitational gloves – from the icon of American comics, i.e.
Superman, who is accompanied by his WildWest villain aide (called Pis-
tolník, the gunman). In what seems to be an inversion, the best-known
⁹At that time, it was not yet today’s gendered title ‘docentka.’ In its abundant use, how-
ever, the appellation designating university faculty in the broadest sense conspicuously
demonstrates the contemporary ‘titulomania.’
¹⁰ In Lacanian terms, one could argue that they are the Real hitting back at the regulations
of the Symbolic Order.
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Robin R. Mudry
Figure 1 Left: Kája Saudek, Kdo chce zabít Jessii? (Who Wants to Kill Jessie?), 1966;
Right: Kája Saudek, Kdo chce dobít Bessii? (Who Wants to Recharge Bessie?),
1966 (Film Posters, Courtesy of Berenika Saudková)
American comics hero, who had historically been chasing fascists (Krohn
2019), appears as a wretch. Once more, formerly clear division lines are
turned upside down and make it difficult to reproduce Cold War re-
ception schemata such as the general rejection of comics as an Amer-
ican imperialist and decadent genre widespread in Czechoslovak post-
war discourses (Foret, Jareš, and Prokůpek 2014).¹¹ It remains nonethe-
less unclear towhat extent such an interpretation of the filmwas common
among contemporary viewers, since they were, unlike Saudek and a small
esoteric circle,¹² not acquainted with the standard visual and narrative
¹¹The question of ideological import when it comes to the role comics are set to play in dif-
ferent (geo)political contexts has been singled out byMcAllister et al.: ‘How these comics
fit in with the socio-political context of these countries, given the different roles that the
comics may play in these countries, is a question of ideological import, as is the potential
of the role of the comics in the creation or resistance of cultural identity and imperialism,
given the economic and cultural dominance of such countries as the United States and
Japan’ (McAllister, Sewell, and Gordon 2001, 4–5).
¹²The question of motivation remains in part open also with regards to Saudek himself,
since he mostly knew about American superheroes from comic strips printed in news-
papers that the food his family received from relatives in the us after World War ii was
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Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
Figure 2 Still Frame from Kdo chce zabít Jesii? (Vorlíček 1966, 28:30) (Courtesy
of Czech Film Fund, Národní filmový archiv, Prague)
features of American comics and might not have perceived the incon-
gruities of the film’s cast. What certainly must have been perfectly under-
standable to everybody, though, was the variation of the first encounter
between Jessie and her persecutors which makes appearances in a one-
page comic strip both in the movie and on its promo posters (figure 1)
(Diesing 2013, 151, 154). The variation shows a different continuation as
the movie poster was torn off by a censor named Prokop Fišer who seems
to have been disgusted by the display of explicit material – the ever-erotic
intensity of the fight between Jessie and Superman taking a sexual turn
– only to be transposed into a dumb workers’ story. Following a differ-
ent script of ‘Com[munist] Comics,’ comrades Superman and Jessie at-
tend a meeting of the labour brigade after which they are told to get back
to work, i.e. to perform an activity they do not really master. The slight
yet significant shift in the title to Who Wants to Recharge [being a pun
on conquer in the Czech title] Bessie/the Beast? (Kdo chce dobít [dobýt]
Bessii/bestii?) makes things even more ambivalent, ironically evading the
all-too-omnipresent grip of censorship.¹³
The attempted censorship even of dreams is openly broached in the
wrapped in, and had to creatively make sense of them (Průkopek 2009, 147–148; Diesing
2013, 21).
¹³The threat of censorship is similarly addressed in the one-page comic strip entitled Con-
frontation of the Century (‘Souboj století’) Saudek was privately working on in the sec-
ond half of the 1960s. While the foreground confrontation is between two female super-
heroines embodying Olga Schoberová and his wife Johana, a giant intruder destroying
the entire setting and emblazoned with the lettering ‘Censura’ might well have signified
the real ‘confrontation of the century’ (Diesing 2013, 150, 157).
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Robin R. Mudry
movie when Superman interrupts his vandalism in Beráneks’s flat to
exclaim ‘Svobodu snům!!!’ (‘[I demand] Freedom to Dreams!!!’; figure
2), which is to be read as a direct answer to apparatchiks like docent
Beránková who had just denied the right to freedom to dream-like phe-
nomena in a preceding conversationwith her husband.¹⁴That this speech
bubble was unmistakably interpreted along such lines is confirmed by the
reportedly enthusiastic reactions it received during the first live projec-
tions of the film (Vorlíček 2004, 95, 98). Toward the end of the movie,
Jessie and the gunman are introduced as the new (dream) workers to
engineer Jindřich’s superior – a pun working around the semantically de-
cisive disappearing ‘s’ of ‘snoví pracovníci’ (‘new dream workers’). In the
meantime, docent Beránková was herself swallowed by the dreamlands
of her dog Czar, whither she blindly followed Superman by means of an
antidote, thus ending the controlling grip on her husband’s and society’s
dreams. Or so it seems, as the assumption of a dream come true with
Jindřich and Jessie eventually united in his bedroom is thwarted as soon
as the heroine unlearns her speech bubbles only to start speaking like
docent Beránková and ordering Jindřich what to dream of.¹⁵
Muriel and the Angels
Muriel (or Jessie) is certainly an atypical name for the Czechoslovak con-
text, mostly reminiscent of the Anglophone role models in Saudek’s work
but maybe also alluding to the archangel Uriel. The whole Muriel story
can be considered a pastiche of the American superhero plot with a re-
markable gender inversion. The import of American (or more broadly
speaking Western) pop culture and imagery is certainly one of the sub-
versive aspects that are worth emphasising in Saudek’s work. We have
to deal with a formal circumstance that was in itself already perceived
with scepticism and aversion by the state authorities, since it no longer
actively undermined or ridiculed a visuality which had been considered
to be a product of bourgeois degeneration with particularly deleterious
consequences for young readerships (Foret, Jareš, and Prokůpek 2014).
Let us, in this regard, exemplarily mention the artist’s usual signature,
¹⁴ ‘Takový zjevy nemají právo na svobodu!,’ ‘Such phenomena are not entitled/have no right
to freedom!’ (Vorlíček 1966, 28:01).
¹⁵ It is noteworthy that a particular structure of temporal circularity and repetition, much
popular in the post-Nouvelle VagueCzechoslovak films of the 1970s, is foreshadowedhere.
The author’s study on this temporal configuration, especially in the films of Jan Švankma-
jer and the so-called ‘crazy comedies’ of the 1970s, is in preparation.
182
Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
‘kresby Kája Saudek,’ which is a condensed play on words conflating the
Czech plural of ‘drawings’ (‘kresby’) and the English ‘drawn by.’ It is not
insignificant that this gesture allowed Saudek to avoid the use of the sev-
enth Czech case, the instrumental, which has no equivalent in the En-
glish language and would have profoundly impacted the Western aspect
of his signature if applied, e.g. by writing ‘kresleno Kájou Saudkem.’ Also,
Saudek playfully combined the ‘o’ of Macourek with the ‘i’ in Muriel on
the cover page forMuriel and theAngels so as tomake his surname sound
Irish: MacOurek. Finally, he opted for the Anglophone ‘comics’ instead
of its Czech counterpart ‘komiks’ and, later on, would even use ‘k/comix,’
the appellation used for underground comic strips in the West since the
1960s (McAllister, Sewell, and Gordon 2001, 8–9). Yet, as we are show-
ing in the unfolding of the plot, Saudek was not uncritical of (American)
forms of militarism and imperialism and it was a very particular United
States pop culture he turned to, namely that of the civil rights, peace and
hippie movements (Diesing 2013, 257, 268).
Enthusiastic about their introduction of comics into film and infused
with the freer atmosphere of the Prague Spring which enabled the imagi-
nation of all kinds of futures, Saudek andMacourek (1991) were ready for
their next joint venture:Muriel. This time, a female superheroine, whose
visual and character genesis can be directly traced back to Jessie, is set in
a not-too-distant future – the late 1980s – where she works as a physician
for the United Nations which by then has taken over the world govern-
ment.While the ColdWar seems to have ended, the rule of force and cap-
ital are still in place and the un present themselves as a techno-military
complex.
After aunplane and aufocrash over the Atlantic, Muriel takes care of
the fatally wounded passenger from another time. While she cannot save
what appears to be an angel and with whom she immediately falls in love,
soon enough the united armed forces of humankind capture anotherufo
and question its angelic occupant in front of theWorld Assembly. It turns
out that the angels are highly sophisticated and genetically optimised hu-
mans coming from the tenthmillenniumad. Since they retrieved ‘an age-
old book which was created at the dawn of history, a book called Bible’
(1991, 29) wherein they most identified with the angels of God, they de-
cided to develop wings with which to fly. Of course, they can also re-
suscitate Muriel’s deceased lover, the angel Ro. In the end, humankind
sends two delegates to accompany the angels to the future: Muriel and
Xeron, the sergeant-general of theunarmed forces whose name badge –
183
Robin R. Mudry
ego army – epitomises both his character and his synecdochical func-
tion with regards to the army.
Travelling through time and space, they end up on a geographically
completely changed planet with an island of love in its centre. What
seems to be a quasi-paradisiacal, anarcho-communist world, a remake
of the garden of Eden depicted in colourful, flowery and psychedelic
tones, where free love among humans and complete harmony between all
species reign, where money, armies or weapons belong to the things peo-
ple knowonly fromhistory classes andmuseums andwhere the only pun-
ishment imaginable is to temporarily deprive someone of their glasses,
which render the others visible, soon, however, turns out to be based on
the exploitation of other planets and their equally anthropomorphic, yet
giant inhabitants. While the amazed Muriel explores everything along-
side her requickened partner Ro, general Xeron could not be more dis-
pleased by what he sees. As soon as he learns about the historical role
of their 1980s contemporary Mike Richardson who would be responsi-
ble for abolishing the military and bringing about lasting peace, he de-
cides to change the course of history and kill that youngster once back
in the present. It comes with no surprise that he can also not understand
how consensual love has become the standard, as, in his view, violence
and hierarchy seem to have made sex attractive in the first place. Xeron
vainly attempts to impress the local beauties with his phallus both in the
Jungian (represented by his 20cm-long cigarette) and Lacanian senses
(his general-cum-macho-style indecency failing) (Saudek andMacourek
1991, 54; Žižek 2008, 175–176), only to be chastised for sexual harassment.
Of course, the angels are aware of the dangerous insights Muriel and Xe-
ron gained, which is why they take some amnesic measures before the
two return to the intradiegetic present day. Nevertheless, everybody in-
volved manages to keep their memories and, once back from the future,
a race to save Mike and thus that very future begins.
In this brief summary of Muriel and the Angels, we can discern a con-
flation of utopian, sci-fi,¹⁶ futurist and also always counterfactual pat-
terns. The latter is not unusual for how comics work with history (Zim-
mermann 2019, 20), especially in the context of time travel (Weller 2019,
167), and serve as a contrasting programmeof ideological worldviews. Al-
¹⁶While on their exploratory trip to retrieve the resource that ensures the humans of the
future their ‘relative immortality,’ the angels compare their mission to the plot of some
20th century film (Saudek and Macourek 1991, 65–66).
184
Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
Figure 3 Kája Saudek,Muriel a andělé (Muriel and the Angels), 1969; First Published
in Saudek and Macourek (1991, 96–97) (Courtesy of Berenika Saudková)
ternative futures near and distant are thus imagined, but always already
threatened, as prefigured in the opening credits where Muriel and the
angels sit not only on the comic strip’s title but also above a huge pair
of glasses reflecting the cosmic changes to come. This is probably most
strikingly illustrated by the quasi-cinematographic cut between the two
worlds and eras, between pages 96 and 97 of the comic strip (figure 3), as
flowers rain down onto the ufo taking Muriel and Xeron back through
space and time to the 1980s. Upon return, the spacecraft flies over a des-
perate scene of drudging workers. The shot is framed with signs read-
ing ‘Dig we must’ and ‘Danger’ as well as an empty bottle characteris-
ing the proletarian condition (of alcoholism) and filled with intermedial
citations including Honza Hrom, with a Saudek comics in his trouser
pocket, and Karel Kanál,¹⁷ as well as the inscription ‘Fanny Hill,’ referring
to the pornographic paradigm of sexuality as explored in John Cleland’s
homonymous erotic novel (1748). The hyperbolic use of ironical allusions
and puns which characterises the entire fight for the future, however, also
constantly undermines the seriousness of any underlying (ideology) cri-
tique. For instance, we read about Mike Richardson that he is the front
singer of The Flowers, performing at a Woodstock-like festival, and that
he is going to sing peace songs by the ‘national artist’ (‘národní umělec’ –
¹⁷The two protagonists were taken from another of Saudek’s partially censored comic strips
which was published in 1968 in the magazine Pop Music Expres (Prokůpek 2014d, 469;
Diesing 2013, 220–227).
185
Robin R. Mudry
a typical distinction for culture workers in socialist Czechoslovakia) Bob
Dylan. The festival’s poster ends with the motto ‘Make Love Not War’
now pointing towards us counterculture. While such chiasmic designa-
tions – combining communist jargon with evident American references
– clearly made fun of the socialist state nomenclature and the ‘tituloma-
nia’ characteristic of its cultural politics, the very end of this firstMuriel
episode – Mike was saved and evil Xeron escaped into outer space with
a stolenufo– enacts and parodies the typical filmic zoom-in of any ro-
mantic happy ending, the only thing missing being the voice-over stating
that they – Muriel, Ro and Mike – lived happily ever after (Saudek and
Macourek 1991, 126–127). Yet, Muriel was to be continued (‘pokračování
příště’) . . .
Muriel and the Orange Death
Even though the publication of Muriel and the Angels was announced
several times in the print media of the publishing house Mladá fronta –
in 1969 the first 29 pages were even printed in the guise of a preview in
the weeklyMladý svět – it had to be postponed given the tragic events of
August 1968 (Prokůpek 2014d, 471). Already, Saudek andMacourek were
working on the second episode of the series as they readily reflected the
change in political circumstances – the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the
WarsawPact forces and the crushedPrague Spring hopes – yetwithout re-
alistically anticipating their ultimate societal and cultural consequences.
Muriel and the Orange Death (Saudek and Macourek 2009) can be con-
sidered a title in displacement, whereby the colour orange takes the place
of red and the announced death comes, once more, from another planet.
All of this is from the outset staged as a filmic intro reminiscent of Jessie
and, most of all, anticipating Four Murders Are Enough, Darling. It is ex-
actly this Orange Planet whereMuriel is kidnapped to by one of its secret
agents who took the happy family triangle – Muriel, Ro and Mike – by
surprise as they were having a picnic in the forest and, thus, smashed
their idyll just in time to prevent them from turning into mediocre petty
bourgeois.
Saudek’s depictions ofOrangeland show adesperate, highlymechanical
place where some sort of artificial intelligence – the central brain – con-
trols almost everything, from what its inhabitants think to how their hu-
mours and emotions go. This kind of mental Gleichschaltung is ensured
by means of little antennae that are implanted on everybody’s heads and
directly oversee their brains by transmitting the central computer’s mind
186
Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
control.While all ablemen are part of the armed forces, women carry out
the necessary physical work, including ploughing fields and digging tun-
nels for a gulag-like systemwhere prisoners from other planets and rebels
are kept in forced labour. There is no parental education and children are
directly taken care of, i.e. militarised, by the central brain. Only presumed
everyday activities are left to individual decision-making but, as the peo-
ple’s wardrobes are empty, there are not many outfits to choose from and
this kind of derived freedom turns out to be obsolete. One needs no par-
ticularly gifted imagination to recognise many features of a Stalinist, or
indeed any totalitarian, regime in the state organisation of the Orange
Planet, including the abovementioned lack of consumer goods.
By accident, Muriel and her abductor collide with Xeron’s ufo while
on their way to the Orange Planet. Still highly opportunistic and thus
without any committed ideological position, the general seizes the chance
of leading the Orange Army to invade planet Earth. As Saudek would
later write (1991, 1), Xeron’s character traits were inspired by Jan Šejna, a
fraudulent general who had made a splendid career in the Czechoslovak
Communist Party after World War ii only to escape into exile and col-
laborate with the cia in early 1968 once his crooked business had been
exposed (t24 2012). As the comic strip unfolds, Mike and Ro had been
frantically driving across America, meeting Batman on the way for the
first and only time in Czechoslovak culture (Saudek andMacourek 2009,
44; Prokůpek 2009, 150), and realising how ‘škoda,’ ‘what a shame’ it will
be to sell their sports car¹⁸ in order to get the angelic walkie-talkie fixed
so that they can call the future for help. Yet, all their projects fail as the
invasion of the Earth has started and is live-streamed on a hijacked tv
channel – certainly not how theWarsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
could be covered. Xeron, in a Herodian gesture, has his lackeys capture
all youngsters who look like Mike Richardson as he still wants to elim-
inate him and secure a bright militaristic future.¹⁹ As Xeron goes on to
confront the World Assembly, we also learn more about the continuous
ideological differences amongunnations – from the Frenchman’s elegant
¹⁸The Czechoslovak car brand Škoda literally means ‘pity’ and Saudek might well have
lamented the fact that his passion for fast American engines was never met by the state-
owned car producer.
¹⁹The comparison to Herod is explicitly made by Muriel in the opening sequence where
she inserts the hitherto adventures into a teleological narrative common to bothChristian
salvific history and theMarxist-Leninist understanding of a directedHistory (Saudek and
Macourek 2009, 8).
187
Robin R. Mudry
remarks while hiding away his Scandinavian porn²⁰ to the Soviet and
Chinese references to the proletariat’s force of resistance – not without
a pungent thrust against Maoism when the chairman’s portrait bears the
small-lettered title ‘Haepatitis Epidemica’ (Saudek and Macourek 2009,
81). On the ground however, all states have quickly fallen and we see
the last fighters fleeing from the orange terror intermedially accompa-
nied by Pat Boone’s 1960 Exodus film score ‘This Land Is Mine’ (p. 78) or
the gospel-cum-protest song ‘WeShallOvercome’ (Saudek andMacourek
2009, 63; Diesing 2013, 268; Prokůpek 2009, 151). Again, it is a very par-
ticular America that Saudek is referring to – that of the civil rights and
peace movements – andWestern capitalism is not spared from (indirect)
criticism. It is notable that companies such as Nestlé andibmare depicted
in relation to the Orange Planet where the first seems to be carrying out
some extraction works (Saudek and Macourek 2009, 94) while the lat-
ter is the brand which had produced the hardware for the central brain
(p. 137), i.e. the planet’s totalitarian ruler.
Unlike the aftermath of 1968, where nobody came to help protesters in
Prague, Bratislava and elsewhere, the inhabitants of the tenthmillennium
get soon informed, in fact ripped out from their land of ‘Flower Power’
(Saudek and Macourek 2009, 97) and ‘Super Kyč’ (p. 98),²¹ and send a
heavenly army to disband the orange forces. Whereas these will still try
to break the morale of their abducted prisoners and manipulate young
Mike into docility by implanting in him invisible antennae, Muriel, who
is by now allied to the underground resistance on the Orange Planet, will
destroy the central brain just in time to prevent the execution of all our
heroes.While joblessGeneral Xeron once again escapes into orbit, we end
up with a family reunion that echoes the finale of Muriel’s first episode
²⁰ Pornographic literature again plays an important role and underscores the sexual subtext
of the 20th century paradigm depicted, as it also happens to be the main source mate-
rial the erstwhile secret agent from the Orange Planet had retrieved (Saudek and Ma-
courek 2009, 23). While most of Saudek’s visuality partakes in heteronormative stereo-
types (Playboy-style beauties in need of male salvation being rescued by hypertrophic
athletes), however, the orangers’ study of humankind is further ironised as they mistake
the almost naked Ro and his angelic companion Bur for homosexual wrestlers, remem-
bering a gay nudes ad from the March/April issue of the 1969 International Times which
Saudek collaged into the comics bubble (Saudek and Macourek 2009, 111; ‘Gay Young
Men, With Style & Pose & Lack of Clothes . . . . . . ’ 1969).
²¹Both are written with flowers and vegetable patterns, respectively, adorning the island of
love which, in thisMuriel sequel, has put forth blossoms in the form of hearts and breasts
(Saudek and Macourek 2009, 102; Diesing 2013, 268).
188
Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
and, inversely, raises the expectations for another continuation. Finished
by early 1970, with Muriel and the Angels still unpublished, it must how-
ever have been clear to the authors of this overtly anti-normalisation in-
stalment staging any orange/red occupation as temporary, that Muriel
and the Orange Death would not meet its audience through any official
channel any time soon. Indeed, Tomáš Prokůpek (2009, 149) goes so far
as to perceive in Macourek’s scenarios the only optimistic answer to the
overthrow of the Prague Spring.
Four Murders Are Enough, Darling or Why Four Times Saudek
Are Still Not Enough
It was certainly in great part thanks to Macourek’s manoeuvring aptness
that Saudek, in spite of being increasingly hindered in having his comic
strips printed elsewhere, could collaborate on another movie in 1970/71,
this time with filmmaker Oldřich Lipský. Four Murders Are Enough,
Darling was presented as a comics-comedy (‘komixkomedie’) and the
Saudek-Macourek duo did not omit any chance to smuggle the artist’s
comic strips, and mainly Muriel, into the film. To start with, the front
credits of FourMurders Are Enough, Darling can be considered to be a ci-
tation from the opening of the twoMuriel episodes, but especiallyMuriel
and the Orange Death, with one of the panels used being a direct vari-
ation of Ro fighting the orange monsters (Saudek and Macourek 2009,
121). Furthermore, there are several flying comic panels throughout the
film that are directly taken from that unpublished book, including page
61, which explicitly depicts the attack of the Orange Planet, imitating a
bottom-up film shot showing two girls jumping over a crimson puddle
of blood and shrieking. We can observe a similarly contrabandist gesture
that Saudek had undertaken with the Czechoslovak 1971 movie poster for
Roger Vadim’s Barbarella. Jean-Claude Forest’s comic strip of the same
name had been both Vadim’s as well as Macourek and Saudek’s liter-
ary model for Barbarella andMuriel, respectively (Prokůpek 2014d, 472;
Diesing 2013, 374–375; Kořínek and Prokůpek 2014b, 546). The knowing
eye will therefore immediately have identified the poster’s protagonist
with Muriel and have recognised Ro in the flying angel next to her. Also,
a folded page ripped from Muriel and the Angels is among the mingle-
mangle of flying objects surrounding Barbarella (Jane Fonda).
While the convoluted plot of Four Murders Are Enough, Darling²² shall
²²A rich gentleman carrying a cheque over 1 million dollars from the central bank of the
189
Robin R. Mudry
not interest us in detail here, it is once more a refined intermedial play
thatMacourek enacts with the help of Saudek’s comics in order to blur the
lines between ‘reality’ and the fantastic world of the comic strip. Indeed,
this happens ex post. The opening scene in a train compartment promi-
nently features one of Saudek’s comics as the nervous money courier is
trying to dissipate his fears by reading the strip and is soon surprised by
the first gangsters. The plot carries on and the scenes are always segued by
means of drawn images and interrupted in themanner oftvads featuring
non-existent commodities. The very existence of comics-style advertise-
ments, which would have been unthinkable in 1960s Czechoslovakia, is
made plausible inside the movie. At the very end of the film, after the
dénouement has already happened, the camera returns to that same train
compartment where our initial carrier has just finished reading the entire
plot of the film in his comic strip. This circular configuration of time²³ is
taken even further when the protagonist opens the compartment door
and a corpse falls onto him just as it happened countless times during the
entire film, which now, in a sort of mise-en-abyme, starts all over again,
redoubling the circularity of time.
The movie can thus also be read as a meta-commentary on comics, es-
pecially in the advertisement breaks and with the integration of comic
signs indicating movements and sounds. Furthermore, the comic strip
is materially present at various locations throughout the movie (both
in the classroom of the foolish literature teacher who despises comics
and in the press office where they are being prepared for publication).
The metaphorical or medial use of the comics and comics’ aesthetics is a
guiding thread when the panels are turned into a film inside the film,
a story inside the story, thus becoming a kind of paratext. Finally, we
also have to deal with a commentary on the authority position regard-
ing comics, which come to play an important deictic role as the filmic
plot unfolds. Yet, at times, the panels deal with censorship directly – as
the poster deemed too lascivious by a ‘Bonzensor,’ i.e. a censor of Bonza-
nia, is quickly removed (Diesing 2013, 179) – and indirectly as in the sur-
reptitious instances ofMuriel’s appearance. When comics are derided as
an inferior genre by the equally ridiculous figure of the literature teacher
who does not understand their popularity and discredits himself for fail-
fictitious state of Bonzania is being chased by two opposite mafia gangs whose members
are continually murdered as they try to get hold of the money.
²³Not unfamiliar to Czech filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague and beyond; see footnote 15.
190
Saudek and Macourek’sMuriel
ing to grasp different registers of language, he rebuts his erstwhile claim
by eventually morphing into a comic hero himself and thus underlines
the genre’s significance in a self-sabotaging way.
Is it then the kind of restart, of reset enacted at the end of Four Mur-
ders Are Enough, Darling, the kind of rolling things back only to let them
start again, yet in a slightly different way, that makes for the seriality of
the comic strip and interconnects it with the kindred medium of film?
Can we then assume that every narrative and its mediations can have
different issues, different lives, afterlives (in the full Benjaminian mean-
ing of Nachleben; Weidner 2011; Vargas 2017)? And what would the af-
terlives of the declared anti-normalisation superheroine Muriel look like
‘after communism,’ i.e. after the fall of state socialism when her only des-
tiny was to be commodified? That is also a predicament where the very
utopia of communism has become unimaginable (Fisher 2009), while
the old scenarios of war and exploitation seem to be repeating them-
selves in the absence of new ideas (Saudek 1991). Unlike those critics
who deemed the Muriel plot ‘a nostalgic memory of the naive ideals
of the 1960s’ (Prokůpek 2014b, 832), its rereading along socio-political
and ideological lines seems to make all the more sense in the second
decade of a millennium that has not only undone the alleged ‘end of his-
tory’ (Fukuyama 2006) but, in instances such as censorship and the lack
of political alternatives, seems to be regressing even further. Or are we
maybe going too far in asking these questions so seriously and forgetting
Saudek’s life-long (self)ironical stance?After all, the namehe chose for his
personal company spoke of Duté fráze bezduchého kýče, that is Hollow
Phrases of Soulless Kitsch. Yet again, this appellation consists of a com-
bination of the most frequently uttered allegations against comics ever
since the late 1940s (Foret, Jareš and Prokůpek 2014, 419–420), i.e. their
being a form of simple-minded kitsch.²⁴ It is therefore another highly
connoted intertextual allusion that raises the ideological premises of its
socio-political situation only to immediately ironise them.
By highlighting the political and ideological dimensions embedded in
the narrative enactments of four of Saudek and Macourek’s joint works –
twomovies and two comic strips – the present paper has tried to demon-
²⁴The words ‘prostoduchý’ (‘simple-minded’) and ‘kýč’ (‘kitsch’) figured in one of the most
poignant attacks on a comic strip: Václav Stejskal’s 1947 lampoon article against Jaroslav
Foglar’s Rychlé šípy as published in the weekly paper Vpřed (Foret, Jareš and Prokůpek
2014, 419–420, 424).
191
Robin R. Mudry
strate that it is not enough to praise the import ofAmerican-style imagery,
or the comic genre itself, into the Czechoslovak pop culture of the 1960s if
we are to grasp the continuing significance of one of its most famous su-
perheroines. Muriel, or Jessie, still manifest anti-normalisation qualities
in the sense that their character traits and their actions point to unre-
alised utopias whose very possibility has been erased from a globalised
post-historical imaginary. A symptomatic rereading of Muriel’s adven-
tures through the lens of critical theory is thus far more than a nostal-
gic return. The missing continuation of her story does not merely point
to Saudek and Macourek’s incomplete lifetime achievement as most of
comic studies hitherto would have it. While it partakes in the ongoing
lack of historical agency, it also hinges on the necessity to think anew
the world historical. In the absence of the presumably ten missingMuriel
episodes, it is thus first and foremost given to her readers to continue
imagining the very possibility of a utopian communism.
Note
A first version of this text was presented at the conference Comics in Commu-
nism – And Beyond: Propaganda and Subversion which took place in Leipzig
on 2–4 February 2023, and was co-organised by the University of Leipzig and
the University of Ljubljana. My thanks go to the conveners Tanja Zimmer-
mann, Gal Kirn and Mirt Komel as well as to Nina Cvar and Pavel Liška.
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