Anthropos 56 (1): 151–169 | issn0587-5161 | e-issn2630-4082 
Engaging Miki Muster’s Legacy: Remembering Zvitorepec (Slyboots) in Contemporary Slovenia 
NinaCvar 
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia nina.cvar@ff.uni-lj.si, nina.cvar@fe.uni-lj.si 
ZoraŽbontar 
National Museum of Slovenia, Slovenia zora.zbontar@nms.si 
©2024NinaCvarand Zora Žbontar 
Abstract. This paper explores Miki Muster’s work and its reception in both socialist and contemporary Slovenia, arguing that a certain type of public corresponds to a specific aesthetic regime. The central the-sisisthatthe socialist public behavesdifferentlycomparedto thecon-temporary configuration, resulting in a changed reception of Muster’s work. With reference to Miško Šuvakovic, the socialist social configu­rationfollowsadistinctivemodeofgovernance,meaningthatthehet­erogeneityof acting in public needs to be taken into account. This pa­perdemonstratesthatMusterintertwinesWesternvisualimagesofhis comiccharacterswiththehistoricalaestheticconfigurationofSocialist Yugoslavia. Due to the change of the political system, the current re­ception of Muster’s work operates as a nostalgic phenomenon, which is demonstrated by the questionnaire distributed to different genera­tions. In the concluding part, the paper presents a synthesis via Ann Rigney’s dynamic model of cultural memory and elaborates onthe fu­ture potential of Muster’s comic imagery. 
Key Words: Miki Muster, Slyboots, political cartoons, nostalgia, capi­talism, socialism 

SpominjanjeMustrovegaZvitorepcavsodobnislovenskidružbi 
Povzetek. Clanek obravnava delo Mikija Mustra in njegovo recepcijo tako v socialisticni kot sodobni Sloveniji,pri cemer izpostavlja, da do-locen tip javnosti ustreza specificnemu estetskemu režimu. Osrednja teza je, da socialisticna javnost v primerjavi s sodobno ucinkuje dru-gace,karvplivanaspremenjenorecepcijoMustrovegadela.Pobesedah Miška Šuvakovica socialisticna javnost sledi posebnemu nacinu delo­vanja. Clanek predstavi nacine, kako Miki Muster prepleta vizualne 
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.56.151-169 
podobe z Zahoda z (zgodovinsko) estetsko konfigurcijo socialisticne Jugoslavije. Zaradi spremembe politicnega sistema sodobna recepcija Mustrovega dela ucinkuje kot nostalgicen fenomen, kar dokazuje tudi anketni vprašalnik, ki so ga izpolnile razlicne generacije. V sklepnem deluclanekpredstavisintezoprekokonceptakulturnegaspominaAnn Rigney in podrobneje obravnava potencial Mustrovih stripovskih po-dob. 
Kljucne besede: Miki Muster, Zvitorepec, politicne karikature, nostal­gija,kapitalizem,socializem 

Introduction 
Ourfirstencounter with Miki Muster,and in particular with hisfamous Slyboots comics, is inherently linked to school summer holidays, which, at least in the time of Yugoslavia were usually spent somewhere on the Adriatic coast (figure 1). On one occasion, luckily for us, the summer sweetness of a child’s boredom was saved by a series of Slyboots comics, given to us by a neighbouring camper. However, the tranquillity of the childhoodrivilegeofnotneedingtocareaboutthelabyrinthinecomplex­ities of social reality abruptly ended with the Balkan wars in the 1990s, when innocence and naivety was turned into asking questions that did not have an easy answer – or to refer to the 1960s phrase, personal sud­denly became political. Whilegrowing older, we ran into Muster’s politi­calcartoons,manyofthemfunctioningdifferentlyfromSlybootscomics, read in our childhoods. How was this possible, we asked each other, en-couragingustothink about the receptionofMuster’swork today. 
In this manner, this article will investigate the relation between Miki Muster’s work Zvitorepec (Slyboots) and the public in both socialist and contemporary Slovenia; we argue that a certain type of public corre­sponds to a specific aesthetic regime. 
Jovita Pristovšek’s (2019) argument in which she claims that the aes­thetic regime blurs the boundaries between art and other spheres of production will allowustorearticulateall threekey spaces of social (re)production – i.e. the aesthetic, the public and the political – as actual regimes, demonstrating that socialist and contemporary regimes have distinctive sets of norms, rules and protocols around which the expecta­tions and actions of the subjects are constituted. 
Accordingly, this paper argues, in reference to Miško Šuvakovic, that the socialist social configuration follows a distinctive mode of gover­nance, meaning that the heterogeneity of acting in public needs to be 

Figure 1 
Slyboots (Zvi­torepec), the Wise Tortoise Trdonja, and the Always Hun­gry Wolf Lakotnik (reproduced with permission of the copyright owner) 
taken into account (Šuvakovic 2011). Thus, this study’s central thesis is that a socialist public acts differently in comparison to the contemporary configuration, resulting in a changed reception of Muster’s work. 
Furthermore, this paper will demonstrate that Muster intertwines Western visual images of his comic characters with the historical con-figurationofSocialistYugoslavia. Alongthese lines,Muster’swork seems to resonate Fredric Jameson’s (1991, 54) claim concerning the effacement of the older(essentiallyhigh-modernist)frontierbetween high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture. Additionally, we claim that due to the change of the political system, the contemporary reception of Muster’s work operates as a nostalgic phenomenon, which is demon­strated by the questionnaire handed to different generations. 
In the concluding part we will deliver synthesis via Ann Rigney’s dy­namic modelofcultural memory and elaborateonthe futurepotentialof the image of Muster’s comics. 

Public Sphere, Life and Aesthetic Regime 
To be able to connect Muster’s image with a specific aesthetic regime, we needtoarticulatetherelationbetweenthepublicsphere,lifeandaesthetic regime. We will start with Habermas’s concept of the public sphere. 
Much has been said about Habermas’s (1989, 49) conceptual idea of a public sphere, where supposedly all citizens would be able to gather anddiscussmattersofcommoninterestinan‘unrestrictedfashion.’How­ever, the Habermasian model of a public sphere is a normative one and is an effect of the process of marking boundaries, resulting in exclusion (Deutsche 1998). Another challenge with the Habermasian model is that it is based on the dividing line between state and society, separating the privatespherefromthepublicsphere,neglectingspecificsof,forexample, socialist states, underlining Nancy Fraser’s (1992) claim that it is almost impossible to separate matters of public and private concern, especially for historically marginalized groups. 
Fraser’s (1992) criticism of the Habermasian model that overlooks marginalized groups,whichnonethelessformtheirownspaces,hasbeen taken asanepistemic base forthispaper in ordertoinspect thestruc­ture of the socialist model of the public sphere, examining its specifics through an analysis of Muster’s works. 
In her book Structural Racism, Theory and Power, Pristovšek (2019) evocatesRancičre’snotionoftheaestheticregimeto–amongotherthings 
– rethink aesthetics in the vicinityofthe nation-state. The importance of Rancičre’s understanding of aesthetic regime is his underlining of a link between the production of works (or artistic practice) and the forms of visibility that these forms take (Deranty 2010), enabling us to think art production and life on the same plane. 
‘Aesthetic regime’ thus represents a field in which a new paradigm of community can be conceived, epistemically positioning itself as a place that openstopolitical thinking,which, asHabermas shows,isafter all connected to the public. In regard to Rancičre’ s analysis, we have iden­tified two distinctive historicalpublic forms, which has allowedus to ad­dress specific themes of socialist and contemporary Slovenia with refer­ence to Muster’s work. 
Structuring the Public Sphere in Socialist Yugoslavia and Postsocialist Slovenia 
Thepublicsphereisaspace ofsocial reflection whichisconstructed dif­ferently inspecific historicalformations. JasminaZaložnik (2017), forin-stance, writes that in Socialist Yugoslavia various unitarisms proclaimed social egalitarianism,brotherhood and unity;aprojectoflanguageand cultural unitarisms, gender blindness, etc., structuring the public in Yu­goslavia as enmeshed with politics to usher in the revolutionary project. 
Despite some of the common traits, the socialist public sphere did changeovertime. Alreadyin the 1960s,Yugoslavpraxis philosophersde­manded a free public sphere, although in the context of understanding public discourse as a medium for facilitating socialist society in Marx’s sense (Križan 1989). Further changes took place with the formation of civil society in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Mastnak 1990), with civil society being seen as separated from the state; in this regard new social movements,e.g.punk,wereessentialinconstitutinganalternativepublic sphere and new political subjectivities. 
Despite the common opinion among western philosophers and soci­ologists arguing that the Yugoslav system was where socialist humanism was well-anchored, and where, accordingly, emphasis was placed on the greater respect of individual rights, compared to its Soviet counterpart (Ramšak 2018). This propelled the so-called self-management system, however even in the 1980s, it was according to Marina Gržinic (2023), difficult to enter the public space, which was characterized as a distinc­tive space. 
WithrespecttoMuster’swork,inhisinterviewforDnevnik,heexplains that when he started drawing, anything which resembled America was not allowed (Mehle 2015), clearly demonstrating the unique relation be­tween the public sphere, collective life and aesthetic regime. However, as we will latershow, Muster’s comicimage drew importantlyonWestern influences. 
On the other hand, the Slovenian contemporary public sphere cannot be adequately understood without taking into account the unique pro-cessesoftheSlovenianmediasphere’sprivatizationthattookplacewithin the change of the political-economic system. 
In their analysis of the Slovenian media space, Sandra Bašic Hrvatin and Lenart J. Kucic (2004) stress that at the beginning of the 1990s a spe­cific privatization model was implemented in Slovenia; they also argue that the main feature of the present day media space in Slovenia is cor­poratization of media discourse, resulting in media content being subor­dinated to the interests of media owners and the largest advertisers. Re­ferring to Bašic Hrvatin and Kucic (2004), in contrast to other socialist East and Central European countries that sold off their media to foreign owners at the beginning of the transition period, Slovenia took a decade to carry out the privatization process; however, in the end it experienced a rather similar outcome that it otherwise aimed to prevent. In a similar vein, other researches claimthe same,arguingthatthe processoftrading and exchanging ownership shares of state-owned companies from 1995 to 2006 resulted in a consolidation of ownership, where a small num­berof‘domestic’ (Slovenian)ownersenabledbothhorizontalandvertical concentration of ownership via numerous interlinked and cross-owned companies(Ribac2019).TosummarizewithMarkoMilosavljevic(2016), the Slovenian media landscape has been influenced by the economic and political restructuring of the former socialist society. Furthermore, with the economiccrisis of2008/2009, theSlovenianmediasector exhibiteda considerablelevel ofweakness,leavingvarious actors,e.g. mediacompa­nies, weaker and exposed to both politicaland advertising pressure from owners and other ‘key agents’ in society (Milosavljevic 2016). 
The structural conditionsof theSloveniacontemporary mediaspace – amongotherthings,inSloveniatherearemorethan2,000mediaoutlets, more than 2,000 journalists and only 2 million inhabitants – and wider technological transformation, e.g. social media channels, are undoubt­edly playing an important role in shaping this space’s content, which is characterized bythe useoftabloidnarratives,andevenverbalexcessesin journalisticstories(Vezjak2024).Inaddition,weareseeinganexpansion of hate speech and phenomena linked to fake news and overall spread of misinformation, encouraging a culture of subjective opinions. To encap­sulate,bothpublicspheres,i.e.socialistandcontemporary,arerelatedtoa specific social bond, which is reflected in distinctive content production. By delineating the characteristics of both the socialist and contemporary Slovenianpublicspace,elaborationofeachoftheaestheticregimescanbe conductedtodemonstratethe receptionofMuster’sSlybootsinboth ver­sionsofthe publicspace.Wewillnow focusonthe case studyofMuster’s Slyboots. 
Case Study: Miki Muster’s Slyboots 

Who is Miki Muster? 
Miki Muster, born in 1925, is a pioneer of Slovenian comics and one of the most successful creators in the field of comics, known for his iconic comic series Slyboots (1952–1973). Slyboots’s characters gained an iconic status very quickly, literally from its launch in the 1950s, when Western culturalnoveltiesweremoreorlessreluctantlyintroducedtothesocialist environment.Heisregardedasoneofthemostsuccessfulcreatorsofcar­toonsinSlovenia aswell. Hisoverall oeuvre is enviable in scope, quality and diversity. 
Between 1952 and 1973 he published in Slovenski porocevalec, a prede­cessorof Delo, acentralSloveniannewspaper,whereheworkedasajour­nalist and illustrator. In1973 he moved to Munich,where hewas engaged in production of cartoon films. During this time Muster also made his legendary commercialadvertisements andcreated aworld-famousseries of cartoons based on the ideas of the French cartoonist of Argentine ori­gin,GuillermoMordillo.Inthe90s,Musterworkedasapoliticalcartoon­istfor Mag and later Reporter magazine. In2015,Musterwasawardedthe Prešeren Prize for Lifetime Achievement, which is considered as one the most prestigious national awards in arts. 
Alreadyduringhislifetime,Musterwaslikearockstar:peoplestopped him and askediftheycould shakehis hand.Eventoday, if (in particular older generations, as we will later show) asked about Muster, they will usually respond that Muster still makes them feel like they have a child inside them. 

Historical Development of Slyboots 
Letusnow focusonthe historical contextof Slyboots. Slyboots wasfirst published in July 1952 in a predecessor of Delo. However, his debut, ac­cording to Alja Brglez’s (2011) extensive study on Muster, was not really a result of a deliberate desire to instigate home-grown comic strip pro­duction. On the contrary, seven years after the end of the Second World War and four years after the Informbiro, influenced by Stalin, the editor Igor Šentjurc commissioneda Disney comic to be published on the most famous and most prominent back page. But the comic did not arrive in time – in one of his interviews, Muster hinted, ‘that the comic had ar-rived,butthatitwasthentakentocustomsorwherever,soasnottospoil the youth’ (Brglez 2011, 59). 
Leaving his suspicions aside, Muster, at that time employed as a jour­nalist-illustrator, was asked to draw one of his own comics, which would resemble Walt Disney’s animal-like characters, but with some Slovenian touches, so that readers would be able to identify with them more easily. 
Handily, within the early socialist period, a quintessential (Western) content in a distinctly modern form was introduced to Slovenia, ques­tioningthebeliefthatthefirstyearsoftheYugoslavandSloveniansocial­istdevelopmentweresealedfromeverythingwhichwasnotideologically consistent and defined by the definitions of the new social order. 
Muster’scomicsandhisprotagonistsresembledDisney-likecharacters, but were adapted to the Slovenian cultural heritage of local fairy tales (to prevent Muster being accused of Americanism) and made a strong connection with their audience (Brglez 2011). 
Inoneofhisinterviews,Musterunderlined theroleofhisreaders,who 

Figure 2 
Road to the Moon (reproduced with permission of the copyright owner) 
were making eager demands to editors to enable a constant flow of the comics,easingthethreat,sotospeak,ofpossiblecensorship(Brglez2011). Muster also explained how he was allowed to draw, albeit on condition that he would not draw American-like comics. 
When the atmosphere liberalized and when it became clear that his comics could do no (political) harm, Muster started drawing picture books. However, there was in fact one reported incident of political censorship. In his comic story Road to the Moon, published in 1959 (Muster 2011a), Muster’s vision of space exploration and above all, a cri­tique of geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, Muster’s protagonists were stopped by the Soviets, which happened to be drawn like bears. Slyboots’s main characters have anthropomorphic ani­mal traits; nevertheless, the Soviet embassyprotested to the Muster’sedi­tor,whoaskedMuster, ‘Whatarewegoingtodo?’ andMusterresponded: ‘Nothing, give me a week to think ofsomething’ (Brglez 2011, 71). Muster continued the story, so the Soviets let the matter go; the Americans did not really care how they were represented (figure 2). 

Slyboots’s Image in Socialist Yugoslavia: Traces of Western Aesthetics in the Socialist Aesthetic Regime 
In the following section of the paper, we would like to show the mecha­nisms by which Muster intertwines Western visual images of his comic characters with the historical configuration of Socialist Yugoslavia. 
In one of the first in-depth studies on comics in Yugoslavia, France Zupan (1969), an art historian and sociologist of culture, underlined the character of mass culture in comics. Zupan (1969) also stressed the im­portanceofregularpublicationandtheuniquesetofvaluesandtradition of the Slovenian cultural space; however, he also emphasized the inter-meshing between Western and socialist aesthetics. 
Yet, Muster’s comics are devoid of official socio-ideology, although the wise tortoise Trdonja openly wears a middle-class bow tie, while the always-hungry wolf called Lakotnik dresses akin to Uncle Sam (without the stars and stripes).This indicates that Muster byno means shiedaway from conceptual messages. Therefore, he was politicallyincorrect, which is typical for youth comics. Additionally, there is one story, a direct criti­cism of the socialist economy, Problems with Construction (figure 3 and figure 4) from the early years of economic liberalization (before Kavcic’s 
Figure 3 
Problems with Con­struction (repro­duced with permis­sion of the copyright owner) 


Figure 4 
Problems with Con­struction (repro­duced with permis­sion of the copyright owner) 
reforms) in 1963 (Muster 2011b). It serves as a direct and clear satire on bureaucracy and social corruption, revealing that socialist Slovenia was not totalitarian (Vidmar 2011, 4). 
IgorVidmarstatesthatSlyboots(Zvitorepec),thetortoiseTrdonja,and the wolf Lakotnik (figure 5) remain vivid in his memory, not merely as nostalgicfiguresbutasjoyful,vibrant,native,comicanimal-humanhero­archetypes.Theyrepresenthisinitialencounterwiththehigh-qualityand dynamicuseofcomiclanguage,whichconsistentlytranscendedthemun­daneaspectsofsocialistsociety,leadingusintotherealmsofaglobalstate of mind (Vidmar 2011, 4). 
Miki Muster, a pioneer of Slovenian comics and a world-class anima­tor, did not receive many awards for his work. However, in 1978, the Yu­goslav associationestablished the Andrija Award (named after the Croa­tian comics pioneer Andrija Maurovic) for achievements in the field of comics,withMusterbeingthefirstrecipientforhislifelongcontributions. The accompanying explanation stated (Modic 2011b, 8): 
Miki Muster, as the most prominent Slovenian creator of graphic literature to date, is recognized for his unique quality achievements in the tradition of Disney’s caricature animal comics, particularly in the earlier period. His work, characterized by drawing integrity andscriptprocessing,laysthefoundationofSlovenianandYugoslav comics while simultaneously earning its place among the classics of the European ninth art. 

Figure 5 
Slyboots (Zvi­torepec), the Wise Tortoise Trdonja, and the Always Hun­gry Wolf Lakotnik (reproduced with permission of the copyright owner) 
Max Modic revealed that Muster remarked that without socialism, he might have established his own studio much earlier in Slovenia. In 1973, as already stated, Muster relocated to Germany for better creative con­ditions and while there, he crossed paths with Guillermo Mordillo, a world-renowned French cartoonist of Argentine descent, who sought a European studio to adapt his caricatures into cartoons. Muster produced nearly 400 films for Mordillo, albeit without receiving credit (Modic 2011a, 5–8). He conceptualized animated films as moving comic books. UponhisreturnfromGermany in1990, Muster’sbodyofworkincomics and cartoonswas extraordinary. He devoted sixteen hours a dayto draw­ing (Modic 2011b, 5–6). 
Stylistically,Muster’sworkinSlybootsisdistinguished byhistranspar­ent framing, effective comic dynamics, inventive scripts, fluent dialogue and an overall reliable composition. Muster used a concise outline draw­ing, initially a pen drawing technique, later ink, with his style gradually maturing into a distinctly precise contour drawing, stylisation and real­istic perfectionism (Brglez 2011). 
Intermsofthecharacters,demandresultedincharacters’ development in stages, as not all of his main protagonists were developed together. Gradually, the series ended in three anthropomorphic, animal-like char­acters,withthewittyandinventivefox,cleverandgood-naturedtortoise, andedgyandgreedywolfwhobecamemostpopularwiththereaders(Br­glez 2011). To quote from one of Muster’s interviews (Teran Košir 2011): 
Sometimes there are stories in which he is the only protagonist. He wasenoughbecausehewasafigureyoucoulddoalotofthingswith. I also liked him. At the beginning he was bloodthirsty, because in thefablethewolfisjustlikethat,butovertimehebecameapositive character. 
France Zupan (1969) also identified a set of values promoted by the centralSlybootscharacters,i.e.optimism,chivalry,honesty,camaraderie, not being too fond of individualistic ambitiousness, self-importance, or authoritarian personalities, and furthermore, always being on the sideof the weak. In Slyboots,thisvalue setisplayedvia evocation ofthe narra­tologicalframework of adventure,the useofnarrative techniques suchas gags and innovative scripts. 


Back to the Present: Slyboots’s Image in the Contemporary Aesthetic Regime 
Let us now jump to contemporary times. Muster’s comic series offers a 
potent research groundforanalysing the historicalreception ofcapitalist 
content in early socialist Yugoslavia (Brglez 2011) and beyond. 
ButperhapsevenmoreinterestingishowMuster’sworkisremembered 
within contemporary Slovenia, which cannot be fully understood with­
out taking into accountits specific transition from socialist Yugoslaviato 
capitalism – aprocess marked by differentstages of neoliberal capitaliza­
tion (Hocevar 2021) and its accompanying cultural mode of production, 
whichinregardtoMusterinparticular, comestolight in hislater work 
from the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, when he was active as 
a political cartoonist. 
Study on the Reception of Miki Muster’s Work: Beyond Slyboots 
For the purposes of identifying reception of Muster’s work in contem­porary times, we constructed a survey using Google forms. The survey, whichconsistedof8openquestions,ą tookplacebetween15thand20thof January2023.Thirty-nineresponseswerereceived,withwomenandmen being almost equally represented. In terms of age, the most responses 
ą The questions are listed in the appendix section. 
came from persons aged 40, followed by persons aged 36 and 44.˛ But 
it was important for us to check if there are any differences between age 
groups, especially in people born in the late 1990s vs. people born in the 
1950s. Unfortunately, it was rather difficult to gain data from the second 
group, which we attribute to the lack of digital skills and competences. 
In terms of education, the majority of respondents obtained a high 
school degree, followed by a bachelor and a master degree. 
A question at which age the readers were introduced to the comic se­
riesissemi-demographicalandmorecontentrelated. Nevertheless, most 
people started reading comics at the age of 10. 
Due to the open-ended questions design, we were able to get access to 
more nuanced sentiments aboutMuster’s work. The questions aspired to 
understand respondents’ remembrance modes; furthermore, the survey 
wanted to ‘test’ the dimension of forgetting by checking if the respon­
dents remembered the main Slyboots characters, although identification 
oftheso-calledcriticaldistancewasalsoinstalledintothesurvey,byask­
ingwhetherthecomicsandMuster’sworkareproblematicinanyway,e.g. 
by putting focus on his later work in reference to his political cartoons. 
What the results show is an obvious sentiment of nostalgia; quoting 
some of the responses: 
They [Slyboots comic series] are a very nice reminder of my youth, 
when I had the passion, time and energy to read and learn about 
theworld.Iwouldrecommendthemtotoday’sgenerations,perhaps 
with notes about the time and place in which they were written. 
Even tome they werepresented as a kind oflegacy,amemoryofthe past, andinthat sense Icanimagine thatthey couldbe entertaining for the younger generations of today. 
They remind me of relaxed summer days, so I have fond memories 
[...] quite nostalgic. I would also recommend them to the present 
generation. 
What we havefoundinteresting is that out of39 responses, almost 75. 
of respondents remember Slyboots’s characters. In regard to ‘contempo-
rarylenses,’14respondentsproblematizerepresentationofwomen,which 
they say evokes patriarchy and orientalism. In terms of controversy, re-
latedtopoliticalcartoons,only6respondentsareawareofthem,ofwhich 
5 problematized them, with one response wrapping up nicely: 
˛ Figure 6 in the appendix. 
I saw the cartoons and I didn’t really like them. Miki is primarily a 
children’s author and I don’t think he’s good at political cartoons. In terms of relevance, again the sentiment of nostalgia is evoked, espe­cially in terms of the value of camaraderie, although we also found out that at least two respondents commented on the issue of comics being outdated due to the type of language Muster was using and the issue of technology. To quote one response: 
I’m afraid [the comics are (not) relevant]. Because the stories are very non-digital, non-technological, very often linked to past eras (stoneage,knights,cowboys...), the languageand thecharacters suffer the ‘teeth of time.’ 
On the other hand, underlining Muster’s comics as a national legacy, and perhaps moreimportantly, the factorofnostalgiahas beenagainun­derscored in respondents’ reactions. 


EngagingMiki Muster’s Legacy: Remembering Zvitorepec (Slyboots) in Contemporary Slovenia; The Contemporary Aesthetic Regime 
What to make of the collected data in regard to Muster’s work, includ­ing his political cartoons, with reference to nostalgia? Let us first start withthedefinitionofnostalgia.ChristopherLasch(1991,83)understands nostalgia as an evocation of a time that is lost forever, and is therefore timeless. The prevalence of nostalgia canof course be very well observed in the conducted survey, as 6 respondents out of 39 speak about nostal­gia directly. But can evocation of nostalgia address the intertwining of Western and socialistaesthetics and furthermore, givean insightinto the functioning of both aesthetic regimes, socialist and contemporary? 
Following Susan Stewart (1993, 23), ‘nostalgia – like any other form of narrative – is always ideological:the past it seeks never existed elsewhere than in narrative,’ and exactly this dimension of the narrative construc­tion is key, as on one hand it enables us to obtain an insight into cultural memory of Muster’s work, shedding light on the role of comics in trans­mitting and distributing these memories and on the other hand, it re­veals Muster’s complex reproduction of the ideological position towards socialist Yugoslavia. Muster spoke about Yugoslavia’s political-economic system in many of his interviews (Bratož 2015): 
I lived in a system that instilled fear; the post-war period was the worst, when youdidn’tdareopenyourmouth,even among family, relatives or friends, because younever knew who would report you. 
In his interview with Dnevnik, along with Delo, another central Slove­nian newspaper, Muster directly declared his political position (Mehle 2015). Interestingly enough, only three respondents in the survey associ­ated Muster with his declared ideological position. But even these three, along with the rest of the respondents, remember and relate Muster and theSlybootscomicswiththeirpleasantchildhoodmemories,underlining the role of the narrative as something which is shared and as such pro­vides a common channel for the transmission of memorability via which different generations articulate their experiences and convert them into a transferable form of disseminating narratives about the past. 
Nostalgia Stumbles upon Dissonance 
Let us go back to the moment when our childhood nostalgia stumbled upondissonance,detectedinMuster’slaterwork. Wewilltrytoaddressit viaAnnRigney’s(2018)thesisonthedynamicandgenerativemodelofcul­tural memory, which is about memorability being culturally produced in changing contexts. Conceptually potent is, in particular, Rigney’s (2018, 
243) claimthat ‘memoryofrecentevents canworkagainstthepowerthat myths have acquired over much longer periods of time.’ 
In regard to Muster’s case, Rigney’s argument proves especially useful as his readers do not really problematize the socialist past; on the con­trary, following their responses, Muster’s claims are ontologically closer to myth. Furthermore, Muster is actually perceived as an indispensable part of socialist Yugoslavia – for instance, one respondent very clearly and directly wrote that Muster’s comics were a mirror of the Slovenian society of that time, but not in a way Muster had perhaps envisaged. If MusterheldagrudgetowardssocialistYugoslavia,itcanbeprovocatively claimed that it was the sociopolitical and cultural context of socialist Yu­goslaviawhichfunctionedasa ‘source’ andimpetusforhiswork,demon­strating that remembrance is an active process, occurring withinspecific historical relations. But remembrance is also a resource for redefinition of the past, albeit in this case of Muster’s work operating as a reservoir for production of images for the purposes of consumerism (for instance, Muster’s images are still used today for selling different products, for ex-ample,Nutella-likeproducts)andfurthercapitalistvalorization,omitting Muster’s sometimes problematic political cartoons and images of patri­archy, orientalism, etc. In terms of the narrative aspect, it is important to addthatthisreservoirfunctionsassomekindofnarrative,whichaccord­ing to Stewart (1993) is directly linked to nostalgia. 


Conclusion 
If we have started this paper with nostalgia, it is only adequate to finish withitagain.Clearly,Muster’scomicsarenotachievingthepopularityto­daythattheydidduringsocialism.Andforthis,thereareseveralreasons, be it transformation of the aesthetic form (analogue to digital), be it the changed conditions of the medium’s formats in terms of production and distribution(digitizationanddigitalizationtogether),orbeitthechanged conditions of how creative industries contents are consumed, with circu­lation being, to refer to Jonathan Beller (2006), a mode of capitalist pro­duction on its own (Beller 2006). 
However, the strange twist, or even irony of history, is that reception of Muster’s comics nowadays is more or less based on the somehow lost values of socialism, e.g. camaraderie and collectivism, which are, at least for the neoliberal organization of the social bond, more or less abolished in favour of individualism, which is clearly detested by at least one of Muster’s central characters, if not all of them, emphasizing the unique traits of the socialist aesthetic Yugoslav regime. Muster’s comic figures arean example of theregime, whereartistic form,massor commercial culture, collective life and politics come together. Based on the responses fromtherespondents,Stewart’sargumentonnostalgiabeingalwaysideo­logicalresonateswell,underliningtheproposedargumenttothinkabout Muster’s work via aesthetic regimes. 
When analysing Muster’s comics, we attempted to identify the recep­tion of the contemporary audience. During this process, we observed a certain duality. In his late interviews, Muster encourages his readers to contemplatebroadersocial issues, but on the other hand, his discourse is the discourse of the 20th century. 
Ifthecontemporary aestheticregimeis the regime of global capitalism together with its associated art forms and modes of subjectivities, char­acterized by a burden to create their own biographies (Beck 1992), nar­ration of memories becomes indispensable for the reproduction of not just individual, but shared memories too. Following the conducted sur­vey, it is interesting that most of the participants who responded to our invitation to take part in the questionnaire are in their late 30s and early 40s and what most of them have in common is their shared memory of the socialist past. But perhaps even more interesting – and a proposal for the next research – would be to get younger people to participate in the survey and delve into Maja Breznik and Rastko Mocnik’s (2021) hypoth­esis on being able to have a shared memory of the past events which the involved individuals did not experience – solely based on experiencing Muster’s comics and political cartoons. 
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Appendix 
The survey on the reception of Muster’s work was conducted via Google forms between 15th and 20th of January 2023, consisting of 8 open ques­tions and also demographical data. We received 39 responses. For the pur­pose of thispaper, theresponseswere appropriately anonymizedandused for interpretation purposes only. Below, we reproduce the 8 open-ended questions from the survey: 
1. 
Have you ever read Muster’s comic strip Slyboots? If so, could you give your approximate age when you read them? 

2. 
Ifyouansweredyestotheabovequestion,howdoyourememberthem 

– perhaps you can share with me some of your memories, associations, etc.? 

3. 
If you answered yes about reading the comics, perhaps you could indi­cate how you remember the characters of the main characters? 

4. 
If you havereadthesecomics,doyoufind themproblematic in anyway today:e.g.howaregender,socialinequalityorsocialsystems(socialism vs.capitalism,theColdWar,new technologies, etc.),criticismof social systems, the value system (e.g. patriarchy, etc.) dealt with? 

5. 
Inthecaseyouhavereadthecomics,doyouthinktheyarestillrelevant today – can you briefly explain? 

6. 
Doyouknowanyotherworksbyhim?Ifyes,pleaseindicatewhichones. 

7. 
If you answered yes to the last question, and if you have mentioned Muster’s political cartoons, I would like to ask you for a brief comment on them: do you remember them, where did you see them, what ideas 


and values did they convey? 
8. What do the Slyboots comics mean to you today mend them to today’s generations? 
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Figure 6 Age of the Participants Who Responded to the Survey