Jucika Redux: Amusing Efficiency
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Steamy reading!
In the last days before Covid-19 struck, I posted on one of my (few) truly productive social media discoveries (versus time-pissing ones): a cold war-era Hungarian comic strip by Pál Pusztai, named after Jucika, a comely office girl. Jucika is notably boy-crazy yet skilled at dishing out comeuppance to men. She has a gift for physical comedy and thinks on her feet like nobody’s business.
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Shoe-shopping among wolves!
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Undated. Sweater too big? She’s got a solution for that!
I wrote that her “problems are posed and resolved in a relentless three-frame format, always wordlessly.” In this set of strips, Jucika navigates the following situations: male passersby ogle her legs as she tries on shoes in a store; her boyfriend’s Christmas sweater turns out to be woefully oversized; her commuter bus arrives home during a downpour; her feet grow cold during wintry bus ride; she falls ill and requires a doctor at her apartment; she boards a train but realizes she’ll never find a seat. In every case she prevails through wits and wiles.
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Undated. A versatile bus, it would seem. Indoor-outdoor!
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Undated. Cold feet!!
Pusztai’s strip came to light via the Internet last year, and has blown up into a cult of sorts. There is a Twitter feed @JucikaDaily and an imgur gallery by CatnipHip. A TV Tropes entry offers this publishing context, among other information: “Originally circulated in the social magazine Érdekes Újság, it moved to the country's sole officially sanctioned satirical newspaper Ludas Matyi in 1959, where it became an iconic part of Socialist era pop culture.”
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Undated. Dreaming of a dreamy doc.
These are wonderfully concise problems and solutions. Not everybody draws this way, to understate the case, but Pusztai does tremendous work with restricted means. Try to compose three-panel wordless strip concepts in response to the prompts below. How do you do? How do the Jucika strips help you think it through?
Right place, wrong time
Does that complete your order?
Halloween Party
Don’t Mind Me
Pál Pusztai, Jucika. Undated. An upper berth.