Kája Saudek


Kája Saudek was a Czech comics illustrator and graphic artist. Called the "King of Czech comic books", from the late 1960s he was considered one of the top artists of Czech comics. He was highly influential as part of popular culture prior to 1989. He was the twin brother of Jan Saudek, internationally known as a photographer and painter.

Biography

Karel and Jan Saudek were born in Prague in 1935, twin sons of Gustav Saudek, who was Jewish, and his Czech wife. Both of their families originated in Bohemia; Gustav was born in Decin. After the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia during World War II, the family was subject to the racial persecution the Germans directed against Jews and Slavs. Kája and his brother Jan were imprisoned with other Mischlinge children in the Nazi concentration camp Luža in Poland. Many of their Jewish family members died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where their father was deported in February 1945, but both brothers and their father survived to return to Prague and rebuild their lives.
Saudek had become familiar with American comics in his early years. He was first inspired mainly by the works of Walt Disney. After the war, as the Communists dominated government and society behind the Iron Curtain, enforced by the Soviet Union, Saudek was also influenced by American artists Robert Crumb and Richard Corben. He became a technical writer and in 1950s worked as a scene-shifter at the Barrandov Film Studios.
There he met the actress Olga Schoberová and featured her as a model of his comic character "sexy Jessie", who became one of his best known characters. He and Olga dated for a time. In 1966, the film director Miloš Macourek used some of Saudek's comic drawings in the film Kdo chce zabít Jessii?, which featured Schoberová as Jessie. During his work on this film, Saudek met his future wife Hana.
Saudek's works became increasingly popular in the Czechoslovakia. In the 1960s he created comics drawings for the magazine Popmusic Express , as well as illustrations to the scripts by Jaroslav Foglar, Ondřej Neff and others. He was influential in the expanding popular culture of the country.
Saudek drew from family and friends in creating his comic characters. In 1969 he published a part of the comic series Muriel a andělé. The album depicts the story of a young physician Muriel, who meets an angel Ro, coming from a distant future. Ro attempts to introduce her to a world without hate, evil people, or death. The communist censors believed the story to be politically suspect and banned its publication. Saudek's style was considered to be too "American"; some of his critics labelled his work as an example of bourgeois kitsch. The complete cycle of Muriel was published in 1991, after the change in governments. In 1971 Saudek contributed to the film Čtyři vraždy stačí, drahoušku with his comic drawings.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Saudek worked as an illustrator for the Czechoslovak magazine Mladý svět. His series Lips Tullian, inspired by 19th-century adventure stories, was banned by the party censors. They began to be more critical of Saudek's collaboration with the popular magazine, gradually restricting his work, and banning it altogether in the mid-1970s. From 1976 to 1978, Saudek created a comics series to the theme of Thirty Cases of Major Zeman, a popular Czechoslovak action-drama television series. The original TV series was intended as political propaganda to support official communist positions. As Saudek's work did not conform to this intention, the Ministry of Interior rejected it and refused to allow publication. In 1999, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the album was published under the title Major Zeman and Six of His Cases.
In 1979, Saudek began his collaboration with the Czech Speleological Society; the Society sponsored publication of several of his comics series in the following decade. In the 1980s Saudek also co-created a popular TV series, Okna vesmíru dokořán, together with Vladimír Železný and Jiří Grygar. The series was produced by the Slovak Television.
At the beginning of the 1990s, following the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, many of Saudek's works were published in new editions. He collaborated with the comics journal Kometa and also with the erotic magazine NEI Report.
Saudek continued his work. But in April 2006 he suffered a bad accident that left him in a coma. He was hospitalised in the Prague hospital Motol, and died on 26 June 2015.
In September 2009, three of his works ranked among the top five of Czech comics in a poll organized by the newspaper Mladá fronta DNES.

Works

Film

Saudek exhibited his works at more than 300 solo exhibitions in the Czechoslovakia and abroad. His drawings are included in significant Czech art collections.