WHEN THE REAL IS NOT ENOUGH: HOW FANTASY COMICS ENGAGE WITH THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR:Concrete Dream Slang: Transforming Narratives through Cut-Up, Intuition and Fictioning

As a detour from the real into the unreal, fantasy, in a rather paradoxical way, eventually succeeds in reducing the distance in mediating complex histories and collective psychic sites, especially in those moments, when the referential discourse fails to adequately frame a happening that is intrinsically ‘unnatural.’ The premise of this panel is to examine the ways, in which fantasy/sci-fi comics engage in a contemporary project of narrating Ukrainian postcolonial realities in the face of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Generic nature of fantasy, coupled with the medium specific properties of comics, opens up the gaps in referential discourse, in which netherlands as “emotional image[s] of the explorable spaces ” arise. Thus, Alexander Pollard’s graphic narrative in progress centers oral historical testimonies from Ukrainian women affected by the war by employing abstracted, ‘cut and paste’ style illustrations, framed in a fictionalized space through the references to the science-fiction works of Philip K Dick. In her paper, Svitlana Stupak reads the rise of horror-based fantasy titles on Ukrainian comics scene as an emotive response to the colonial ‘amnesia’ of national history, which blurs the line between the past colonial trauma and the realities of the continuing war. <br/><br/>A J Pollard:<br/>-My practice-based PhD consists of a series of comics/zines that, in part, cover aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In creating these works, I utilise intuitive cut-up techniques and fictioning to generate narratives that ‘write and illustrate themselves’, similar to what ‘weird studies’ scholar Erik Davis calls a ‘self-producing vortex’ when discussing the late work of science-fiction author Philip K Dick.<br/>-My paper will focus on one of the comic outputs I have produced as part of this practice-based PhD. This comic is titled Concrete Dream Slang.<br/>-Concrete Dream Slang ‘fictions into’ real oral historical testimonies taken from a series of conversations held with Ukrainian women affected by the Russia/Ukraine war. I plan to deliver a short reading, and discuss my methodology, the low-fi, abstracted and hauntological drawings and the overall weird atmosphere of the work. <br/><br/>Key questions raised in the work: <br/>1. How does the production of alternative comics facilitate an exploration of the interplay between reality and fiction?<br/>2. In what ways do personal histories and oral testimonies intersect with principles of fictioning, intuition, and the cut-up process in the creation of alternative comics?<br/>3. How do alternative comics contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the domain of intuitive creative methodologies?<br/>4. What are the various approaches employed to examine and critique the Russo/Ukrainian War within alternative comics, particularly in challenging narratives of machismo?<br/><br/><br/>