Jerzy Szyłak

Jerzy Szyłak, born in 1960, is a Polish film and literary critic, pop culture researcher, and comic book scriptwriter. Professor at the University of Gdańsk. The author of several works on comics, as well as others about cinema and the transformations taking place in contemporary culture. His most famous publication is Comic Books: The Overdrawn World. The most important works in his career include The Comic Book in the Iconic Culture of the 20th Century: Introduction to Poetics of Comic Books (1999), Aesthetics of Comic Books: Iconic and Linguistic Layers (2000), and Body Games: On the Images of Women in Contemporary Culture (2002, extended re-edition in 2013). All of them bring together reflections on the changes in culture through the analysis of literature, film, photography, and, of course, comic books. In comic books the author finds that there is a clear striving for provocation, the violation of social conventions or boundaries of good taste, and exploration of frontier areas of life. In Sour Apple (Timof, Europe Comics in English), a comic book illustrated by Joanna Karpowicz, Szyłak depicts the brutal world of domestic violence.