Comic book Westerns began to appear in Poland in the interwar period, and these were mostly translations and adaptations of American or European works, although several Polish Western comics were published at that time, too. The Second World War interrupted the development of the art of comics in Poland, and its aftermath was far from conducive to the revival of the genre because of the strict control of the publishing market by the authorities. It was in the 1960s that authors could again create comics with a greater sense of freedom, and this is when the comic book Western re-merged in Poland, largely thanks to the work of Jerzy Wróblewski, one of the most prolific Polish authors of comics of the second half of the twentieth century, who employed a range of popular genres in his work. He was the only Polish comics author who can be said to have specialized in the Western, and the paper will concentrate on the construction of heroes and anti-heroes in his Westerns. In the 60s and 70s he produced a series of sensational/adventure formulaic Westerns, featuring what might be called romantic Western heroes—lone men with exceptional fighting skills and a good sense of justice. Some of them set out on a search for beloved women who have been kidnapped, which enhances the aura of romance. In the 80s. Wróblewski continued to work on Westerns, but completely changed the convention into a cartoonish, parody representation. He created a series of stories about sheriff Binio Bill, who always takes the upper hand, but before this happens he faces adventures the depiction of which resembles gags in a slapstick comedy. The aura of heroism that traditionally surrounds the Western hero is thus completely dispelled.

This paper examines Eric Drooker’s 2010 graphic adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as a reinterpretation of Ekphrastic Beat poetics in visual form. By translating Ginsberg’s charged rhythms into sequential art, the adaptation fleshes out the poem’s core tension between resistance and repression. Moloch will be read as a visual embodiment of faceless, mechanized power, a modern anti-hero, while Carl Solomon stands as a symbol of human vulnerability. The paper attempts to explore the shared ground between Beat poetry and comics, both of which challenge conventional narrative through fragmentation, reworked structures, and rhythm. The incantation of the unsymbolisable , the inchoate, and the essential sense of uncontainment of the poetry is transfigured into panels of abandon and colour. The adaptation brings to the surface the psychic dissonance at the heart of Howl—where language falters before the trauma of modern life, and the image steps in to express the ‘untranslatable.’

The Asterix comics, created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo in 1959, have for over half a century played a vital role in contextualizing life under the Romans. It is in fact oftentimes the very first contact its younger readers might have with Antiquity.

The stories have transported fans of all ages to several of Rome’s provinces, offering a pointed critique of imperialism while also delineating the benefits of cross-cultural interaction. Asterix is a hero whose physical strength derives from his community: he is a regular Gaul who drinks the magic potion brewed by Panoramix, the druid, as an act of resistance against the Romans. In his travels, he meets many peoples who attempt to resist in their own ways.

By telling the stories of martial glory through a graphic narrative, it could be said that the Gauls would be reclaiming a very Roman narrative strategy, as Roman Emperors were famous for commissioning detailed retellings of their victories over one people or another (see the Arch of Titus or Trajan’s Column). Julius Caesar, himself the antagonist of Asterix, went as far as to write “The Conquest of Gaul”.

In this paper, I will argue that Uderzo and Goscinny caught on to the similarities between Gaul in the first century BC and France in the 20th century AD, effectively using the ancients to speak about their present. While some of the grand themes of the comics, such as national identity, are retroactively imposed on Antiquity (see Hobsbawm, 1990, “Nations and Nationalism since 1780”), other major topics, like Imperialism, have roots in Classical Civilisation (see, for instance, Loren J. Samons, 1999; E. Babian, 1968, for Greek and Roman Imperialism respectively).