It is no secret that at the beginning of the 90s there was a real pop culture explosion in Poland. Videotapes with imported films appeared on the market (and on the markets), private TV stations broadcasting American series developed dynamically, and young readers could learn about Marvel and DC comics, and soon also other foreign publishers. Whoever grew up at that time naturally soaked up all of this.
Currently, the same people shape Polish popular culture. Writers such as Jakub Ćwiek or Marcin Mortka eagerly reach for themes known from American films and books. Bartosz M. Kowalski made an attempt to transfer the clichés known from slashers to the Polish soil. In comics, on the other hand, young artists are inspired by, among other things, notebooks with superheroes’ adventures they learned in their childhood.
Domestic product
The authors of Department 7, belonging to the generation of the 1980s, also follow this trend. Their series draws undisguised from the X-archive format and the adventures of members of the Paranormal Research and Defense Bureau, but also refers to the adventures of Captain Żbik, setting the plot in the PRL era of Gomułka. It’s an idea with a lot of potential that is easy to waste by creating a banal copy. Fortunately, the creators seem aware of this threat. The title unit is therefore subject to the people’s power, and more specifically the Security Service, and its functionaries, apart from all paranormal secrets, also have political and ideological considerations on their mind.
Operation Totenkopf , Larinae and Living Water merely introduce us to the main characters: an experienced SB major, a new recruit, pathologist, priest and a Roma secret collaborator. The notebook format requires brevity of the content, so they are necessarily roughly sketched in the first issues. May their personalities be a bit more developed in the following parts and that you could learn more about them. For now, they are far from the expressiveness of Mulder and Scully or John Constantine.
Serial construction
The plot of Department 7 begins in 1962, although in our flashbacks to the first comic book we go back to the times of World War II. The series is structured as a procedural, in which each episode tells about a different investigation. The individual stories are inspired to some extent by real events and themes from legends and folklore, creatively mixed by screenwriter Tomasz Kontny. The notebooks have been enriched with several pages of additional materials stylized as personal files or case files, in which there are, for example, reproductions of protagonists’ ID cards, fragments of reports and similar atmospheric trinkets.
The idea for the series to be co-created by various cartoonists was apparently largely forced by logistical considerations, but it also worked very well in terms of art. Illustrators of Department 7 present a variety of styles, use a variety of techniques, and interpret characters differently, which makes reading even more interesting. This is reminiscent of the procedure often found in serials, in which individual episodes are directed by different people who, to a greater or lesser extent, leave their mark on them.
To be continued…
The first three parts of the series fare very well and encourage you to follow the further fate of the heroes. I am very curious to see what other artists can be persuaded to illustrate Department 7 and what other secrets from the archives of the People’s Republic of Poland were discovered by the screenwriter. I also hope that the creators of the series will fully use the potential of the plot and the characters they have created and will make it not only a curiosity, but an important element of Polish pop culture. I want to believe!
