Review time! with ‘So Far So Good’

“No car, no keys – I had to get us stranded”

On the back of this book is written the word “Czechia,” which is what the name of the country is now, and that’s the first time I’ve seen it in print outside of where I was reading about how the Czechs wanted to change the name of their country. It looks weird, doesn’t it? Ah, we’ll get used to it. Anyway, So Far So Good is a Czech comic by writer Jan Novák and artist Jaromír 99. It’s translated by Robert Matzerath and is published by Centrala (and it was printed and bound in Poland, which is nice for the Poles, I guess).

This book was originally published in 2005 as a novel, and I’m not sure if Novák simply turned it into a comic script or if Jaromír adapted it without his involvement. It seems like the former, as the copyright on the book is 2018, not 2005, but either way, it was originally a novel, and now it’s a comic. I give you the info, people!

The book is about the Mašĺn brothers, who in the early 1950s were part of the resistance against the new Communist leaders of Czechoslovakia. They killed collaborators, blew up rail lines and trains, and were thrown in prison for a while. Eventually they escaped to West Berlin and were allowed to move to the States, even though they very much wanted to return to their homeland at the head of an army. They were unaware of the fragile state of the wider world in the early 1950s, however, and the U.S. was not willing to foot the bill for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Citrad (who’s called Radek in the book) died in 2011 of leukemia, but Josef is apparently still alive (he turned 90 in March). Both brothers did fairly well in the States, with Josef, it seems, having more success than his brother.

There’s apparently a lot of debate about the Masin brothers (forgive me for Anglicizing their last name, but the Slavic characters look dumb on the page, sadly), because even in this book, in which they’re clearly on the right side of history, they’re not terribly nice. They kill a good amount of people, some seemingly at random, and it’s hard to really respect them because they do seem to be loose cannons every so often. Novák doesn’t really pull any punches; yes, his subjects are fighting for what’s right, but that doesn’t mean they’re all that admirable. It’s a clever tack to take, because he probably couldn’t lionize them too much without a backlash. I imagine writing about a subject like this is difficult, because so many people under dictatorships don’t necessarily collaborate or even like the dictatorship, but they don’t want the government to come to their house in the middle of the night and drag them off. However, that often makes them targets of idealists like the Masins, who fight the Communists all the time and are undeterred by any punishment. Novák doesn’t approve or disapprove of their actions (I imagine he approves of it, because they’re fighting a dictatorship, after all), as he simply shows what they’re doing and how oppressive life is under the Communists. There are a lot of shady policemen hanging around, and the Masins lose their home because it’s too bourgeois (they get moved into an apartment), and the government forces political prisoners to work a uranium mine with no protection, and so Novák is able to make clear how terrible Czechoslovakia is and why someone would join or form a resistance movement. On the other hand, he also shows a lot of people just trying to live their lives, and the Masins are upsetting that apple cart. They have a mother, but they don’t have wives and children, so it’s easier for them to rebel, and they also have a bit of protection because their father was a war hero. Novák does a nice job hinting at the privilege they enjoy without being too obvious about it. It doesn’t keep them out of jail, but it might have kept them alive a bit longer than if they had been no-names. It’s an interesting kind of story, and Novák does a decent job with it.

I don’t love a few things about it, though. The Masin brothers leave Czechoslovakia rather abruptly, heading north to Berlin in order to get out of Dodge. It seems like the fact that they’re about to be drafted into the Czech army, which is fair enough, but they simply drop everything and take off. They leave their mother and sister behind, which ties into the idea that they’re not the greatest people in the world. It’s a bit strange, and it feels like a slight failure on Novák’s part. Neither brother is all that interesting, either – they do their thing, and they’re passionate about fighting for freedom, but except for Josef being a bit cheeky when he’s being interrogated, their personalities aren’t that strong. The narrative is a good one, which carries the book along well, but they’re still not that interesting as characters. Due to that, it’s hard to really figure out what they want – obviously, they want to get rid of the Communists, but that’s an amorphous goal, and Novák doesn’t do enough to give them motivation. Josef and Radek come off a bit as thugs who like to shoot people, and it just happens that the regime they’re fighting against is oppressive, so their thuggishness is rewarded, but they don’t seem to have much thought about what would happen if they actually get rid of the Communists, and they don’t seem to particularly care. It’s a weakness in the book, and it’s frustrating because the book is very interesting, but a bit off-putting because of the lack of personality at the center.

The art is more interesting the more you look at it, which seems like a good thing. Jaromír doesn’t do great with action, because his figure work is a bit stiff, but it’s not terrible. Tied into Novák’s work with the personalities, the facial expressions on the characters don’t work very well all the time, but that’s not incredibly necessary due to the churning plot. However, the pros of the art do outweigh the cons. He uses nice, thick lines and a lot of chunky blacks, which adds a lot of weight to the art, and he uses white and reds very nicely – the main characters are colored light red to make them stand out, and when the brothers are moving through the woods on their way to Berlin, he makes the rain white instead of black, which makes it stand out very well. In the later parts of the book, red begins to creep into the coloring as the action becomes more frenetic and violent, and Jaromír does some very neat things with the perspective and the angles, which makes everything look a bit askew. He also does some nice work when he doesn’t use lines, as a lot of coloring is simply unbounded by black lines, so the background often looks a bit surreal. What his line work does the best is make Czechoslovakia a truly brutal place, as his thick lines turn the architecture and even the people into a Stalinist nightmare, and the tone is very powerful. What’s interesting is that Jaromír can thin his line out quite well, so some of the pre-Communist buildings are not brutalist, which stands out in contrast to how the new regime has overridden society. In many panels, his backgrounds become a bit expressionistic and stylized, which creates a bit of the propaganda poster effect that you often see from governments that are trying to change the way people think, and that makes the book a bit more foreboding. It’s a neat-looking book, with a style that tends to grow on you as you move through it.

So Far So Good is an exciting book, despite its flaws. I enjoy seeing how different societies – especially ones under dictatorships – function and how the people in them resist, and so this was interesting to read. The fact that Josef and Radek aren’t terribly admirable is both a pro and a con, as it’s interesting to think about how the very society they’re fighting against may have brutalized them, but it also makes their struggle less compelling. It’s not a great comic, but there’s a good deal to like about it. Check it out below!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆