Currents and Countercurrents

Victoria Lomasko (Russian, b. 1978). The Russian Constitution Was Changed, 2020. Digital comic

Victoria Lomasko’s The Russian Constitution Was Changed.

Victoria Lomasko’ s

“The Russian Constitution Was Changed” exemplifies the value of approaching comics pages as not only sequential but as planar. Because we encounter the whole page before focusing on a given panel, and that whole is peripherally present even as we focus on a panel’s words and visual details, general impressions of the page’s color and layout both precede and influence our reading individual panels. To the extent that these global structures affect their embedded contents, Lomasko’s visual style and arrangement cannot be understood as secondary to the linear, textual experience of reading her work, but are rather the plane which contains, shapes, and continually informs reading. To a degree, this applies to any comics page, but Lomasko’s striking layout, fragmentary account, and laconic narration all invite greater attention to such structures. For example, the panels of the center column and row are all strict squares; together they form axes, thereby enlivening the basic page composition of the nine-panel grid by creating a central cross geometry. This cross formation picks up and emphasizes the religious symbols that appear in several panels, but also defines two distinct spaces and series: the five regular familiarly square panels and their four irregular counterparts. However, the overall page space is not a perfect square: it also includes the title, its triple arches conforming not only to the top panels but to the chain that rises above the middle trio. Instead of a 3 x 3 gridded composition, these arches evoke a paneled Christian triptych icon, so common in the Byzantine art of the Russian Orthodox church, with a central panel flanked by two smaller wings. The semiotics of Orthodox iconography might seem an unusual choice for a work of conventional journalism. But if we recall that Russian religious artists eschewed realistic Renaissance perspective in favor of spiritual expressionism— some that were later celebrated in works of anti-positivist modernism—the appropriateness of the icon for alternative journalism becomes apparent. Furthermore, the iconic emphasis on social-spiritual expression over artistic genius has some affinity with Lomasko’s own predilection for public graphic reportage over more insular fine arts. By evoking predominantly vertical and visual icons, rather than only lateral text-oriented articles, Lomasko also invites us to begin viewing or interpreting the page beginning with the central column as its topic. Surrounded by faces and figures, human forms are strikingly absent from the bold, central “0” (a location in which the iconic subject’s portrait might normally appear). This reveals a distortion, the tall and figuratively empty 0 not only standing in for, but replacing or distending, the balanced, ideal circle of a Saint’s halo. Flanked by the twin stars of the Kremlin’s spire and a Gulag watchtower’s abstracted guard, the 0, absent a figure, becomes a threatening political portrait in its own right. (While familiarity with icons encourages such a reading, the bold black numeral and its two negative spaces above the text, naturally draw the eye and, in their lack of detail in an otherwise-dense composition, encourage the viewer to linger, whatever their knowledge of Byzantine religious art.) The thickly framed zero symbol is not actually empty, however, but contains another reference to the zero concept in the oddly worded phrase, “20 years of power became zeroed,” suggesting a reset to a new technical measurement. The panel refers to the 2020 referendum that, along with conservative and nationalist amendments, extended Vladimir Putin’ s term limits, effectively resetting the political clock of his two decades in office (hence the third panel’s invocation of the year 2036 as the new “term limit” of his presidency). This central 0 might be interpreted, then, as an emphatic double negation, repeating the title’s passive-voice omission of agent and cause.

Reading this comic as an icon, the (sequentially) first and third panels stand as the “wings” of the central image, encouraging us to “read” them as in some way subordinate to the central image. Their floating positions, with their decorative sensibility, connected by a chain that flows “under” the central 0 panel, also suggest the latter’s privilege. This hierarchy disrupts purely sequential reading: the layering, graphic geometry, and central symmetry affect a persistent visual gravity. Granting the initial visual impact of the 0, Lomasko’s preceding question, “What happened?” seems to be asked after we have encountered its answer. This sequential incongruity is amplified by the frozen protester’s positioning: where the 0 is balanced in its symmetry, fixed by its frame, literally grounded by its environments, the protester floats in white space, her amber prison anchored to the central subject. Her question seems almost bewildered, speaking to the immediate past, while its mirror speaks to the uncertain future. At once chained and frozen in amber—suggesting confinement, paralysis and extinction—the message seems a profoundly pessimistic commentary on the Russian political environment. However, the second question indicates a possible hope in futurity, as does its answer.

Against the dark landscape, brightly dressed younger Russians respond to the first tier’s condition. The second tier recalls Lomasko’s more typical reportage: sketches documenting a moment and atmosphere not through photojournalistic coherent precision but through fragmented heterogeneity. While this tier suggests linearity through its dialogue, the montage also operates as a panorama, as details bleed from one panel to the next. This fragmentary whole informs our experience of the dialogue: a single sentence is collectively uttered by a multiplicity of voices, individual but unanimous. Evoking the titular “change”—but as a future condition prevented in the present—this sentence literally underscores and develops the frozen-in-amber imagery, the active change that prevents change. This seeming paradox may be resolved by recognizing competing definitions of change. This second tier elaborates that fossilizing preservation that halts biological growth is also the constitutional change that resists social change. From this bifurcation of “change,” the significance of color reemerges through juxtaposition. Contrasted by the speaker’s counter-cultural vibrancy, the surrounding drab brown develops its own environmental force. The middle tier’s conflict invites reflection on the comic’ s vertical symmetry. The protester’s bold “НЕТ!” (NO!) mask in the central panel of the final tier represents the symmetrical inverse of its counterpart (the central panel of the top tier) by presenting a human portrait threatened by authoritarian figures, rather than the abstraction supported by power. Where this symmetry, however, is most developed is in the wing commentary panels, which are again articulated symbolically, rather than as documentary. Brown, the color of frozen time, the refusal of change, reappears in religious, authoritarian imagery. Where the amber above might initially be understood as simple stasis, these lower corners are distinctly anachronistic, explicitly describing a return to an imperial past. The Dormition Cathedral “sprouts” from Soviet architecture while Putin stoops, rooted in place and seeming to merge with his throne. Repeating the first tier’ s structure, these unenclosed panels likewise comment on their central panel’s description of constitutional change, but further develop these desaturated tones, imbuing them with a sense of unnatural, resuscitative transformation that underscores the violence of the amber “preservation.” Sequentially understood, the narrative ends on a purely pessimistic note. But, if Lomasko’s composition begins with the visual magnetism of 0, it ends with its opposite pole in the protester’s piercingly direct stare. Again, the floating wings do not definitively begin and end Lomasko’s account, but only comment on its urgency. Where 0 graphically presents an authoritarian political negation, its mirror НЕТ! repeats negation, as political resistance. It is through this synthesis of linear reportage and planar juxtapositions that Lomasko not only reports on the repressive referendum but also complicates our understanding of its effects, and emphasizes the importance and urgency of activist opposition.