COMICS IN HUNGARY
by Gergely Nagy (gergo@hvg.hu)

The first comic strip published in Hungary was an adaptation of Wilhelm Busch's stories in Hungarian language translated by Lajos Cziklay in 1891. The first comics magazine was the Hari Janos (1936) edited by dr. Karoly Heumann.

The main influences on the Hungarian comics scene came mostly from German and English comic art, later from the French style and also from Hungarian literature (artists like Erno Zorad made many adaptations).

The "golden age” of Hungarian comics were the 60s and 70s.The best known artist is Erno  Zorad (still living in Budapest). Hungary has a pretty strong cartoon-tradition: there are a lot of serious and internationally known cartoonist in our country (Kajan, Brenner, Sajdik, Fulop, Hihi).

Unfortunately the current situation is sad: we have no serious comic art scene in Hungary, the magazines and newspaper ignore the comics, there is no formal education for this genre of art; there are few new talents and those who work soon disappear in the applied arts. Hungarian publishers mainly push the mainstream American comics: Superman, Spiderman…

There is, nevertheless, a collector's scene (not so wide, but nice) - they mostly collect Hungarian comics.

There are a lot of comics fans, but not organized.
 

Stripburek
2001