Original Rapid Arrows comic strips on display at Prague Museum of Literature
An exhibition dedicated to Rychlé šípy or The Rapid Arrows, a legendary Czech comic series by Jaroslav Foglar about the adventures of five boys in the city, got underway at the Museum of Literature this week. Among other things, it showcases the original first editions of the legendary comic strip. I spoke to its curator Pavel Kořínek:
For those who have never heard of the comics The Rapid Arrows, how would you describe it? Who are its main characters?
“It is a comic that tells a story of this group of five young boys, aged between 10 and 14, who came together as a sort of club. They live in some big city and enjoy adventures in the countryside as well as in the streets of the city. It is a quite interesting genre of comics; we in Czech comic history tend to call it club comics. And the Rapid Arrows are really the most important Czech comics of the 20th century.”
The first episode of the comic series appeared 86 years ago on the 17th December 1938. And as you said, since then it has enjoyed a sort of cult following. How do you explain its popularity?
“There are several reasons why The Rapid Arrows became such a hit with Czech readers and why it still remains quite popular. At the end of the 1930s, it was the first really modern comics. It had speech bubbles, which is something that was not that common at the time. It was comics that allowed its readers to somehow feel as being inside the story.
“The Young Herald or Mladý Hlasatel magazine, in which these episodes were published, also tried to organize its own clubs, based on this model, and it was really successful. The comics were published in that magazine until 1941, when the magazine was banned by Nazi protectorate authorities. And it offered a one-of-a-kind opportunity to participate in a grass-root youth organisation, at a time when other Czech youth organisation were banned or closed by the authorities.”
The comics was not banned only by the Nazi authorities, but also by the communist regime. It was then released again following the Velvet Revolution. How popular is it today? And is it still relevant for young readers today?
“That is a quite sad story, that the Rapid Arrows were not banned just once, but three times, in 1941, in 1948, and then for the last time in 1971. Today, these comics are still quite popular. Obviously, the stories are becoming a little bit dated, in a sense that they tell a type of stories that are somehow didactic, and today we tend to look for different type of stories.
“But there is still a huge amount of people who loved the Rapid Arrows, who read those stories when they were kids, and there is a huge group of people who like to look at those comics, read those stories, and somehow return to their childhood or to the times which they perceived as something precious.”
Can you tell us a little bit about the current exhibition, at the Museum of Literature? How is it different from previous exhibitions dedicated to The Rapid Arrows? How is it organized?
“Well, as you said, we are exhibiting the originals of the magazines from the 1930s, but the most important thing is that we are exhibiting the original art of the comic pages. For the first time ever, we had a chance to exhibit all the 113 episodes that were published between 1938 and 1941 in the original art by Jan Fischer.
“It is a quite interesting opportunity for me as a comic historian to have a chance to do something like that, because those originals are two or three times in size to the size in which they were published in the magazine. These originals are mostly in black and white because the colours were done in the printing house.
“And for the first time ever, we are pairing these original arts with typewritten scripts of Jaroslav Foglar. Comparing the script with the finished art, you can really see how these comics came to existence.
“The exhibition will change three times. We decided to do it for something like a series, because these originals are so fragile that they cannot be exhibited for more than a month. So in the next four months, we will eventually exhibit all the original pages of the 1938 to 1941 epoch of The Rapid Arrows.”
