Comics

ALOIS NEBEL – a railway blues, trilogy

An original Czech graphic novel (2003 – 2005), 350 pages in all

Railway tracks can take you places: to Lisbon or to Auschwitz, to your own past or even to your doubts, the scrapes of what your parents, friends and enemies have left behind…

The suggestive form of a black-and-white cartoon presents an ingeniously built piece of literary work. With the 20th century as a background you witness a story of seemingly ordinary people, living on the outskirts of the society, their lives being absurdly affected by the Great History for generations. It feels like The Closely Watched Trains of private lives.

The black-and-white cartoon novel evolves on three levels. The first one tracks the history of the Central European region since World War I. It follows it to the expulsion of Germans from the Czech Borderlands, goes on to the Russian occupation in 1968, and finishes with the devastating floods at the end of the century. The second level reveals a very personal story of the narrator: Alois Nebel is a former railway employee, currently hospitalised in an asylum. The surname Nebel translates “fog” in German, or “life” if read backwards. Lastly there is a criminal story of a Polish murderer, which encloses the plot into a complex circular layout.

12.000 copies of the Czech version have been sold so far. The script was awarded as the best original Czech cartoon (2006). The first volume (Bílý Potok) came out in a limited English edition. Its dramatic version (“a cartoon play”) appeared on the stage of Divadlo Komedie (Theatre of Comedy) in 2005. A comic strip version publishes a prestigious magazine Reflex every week. A new complete edition of the trilogy in Czech is coming out in October 2006.

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