Osiedle Swoboda (Freedom Estate)
Welcome to the land of podpaski, dear visitor! These little strips of commentary are an essential part of Produkt’s aesthetic and have accompanied the magazine since its very first issue in December 1999. They add an extra voice to the comic you’re reading: an anecdote, a joke, a fun fact, a cultural recommendation, an uncultured recommendation, a heartfelt greeting, or a sharp jab straight in the pupil. Usually written just before the issue goes to press by the mag’s editor-in-chief, Śledziu. That’s me. Yep, that’s me tapping away at you.
Back to menu ↑Osiedle Swoboda (Freedom Estate) pt. II
And straight away we’ve got a problem: so much has already been written about Osiedle Swoboda, hanging here and there, that there’s little left to surprise anyone with. A partly autobiographical, rough-around-the-edges fictionalised chronicle of life at the turn of the millennium for a bunch of twentysomethings, written and drawn as it all unfolded, ahead of similar developments in prose and film, mixing genres from comedy to horror with a dash of magical realism? Yeah, that.
Back to menu ↑Humour Section
Produkt had a sturdy little comedy leg to stand on. Humour—which, I freely admit, could get pretty crude—was deliberately slipped into most of its series, even those you’d struggle to classify as comedy comics…
Back to menu ↑Humour Section pt. II
From Michał “Bizon” Lasota’s “park-bench philosophy”, found in every one of his comics, where we find ourselves grinning at the pavement or some other slab of precast concrete, through the joyous cartoon antics of Marek Lachowicz and his Człowiek Paroovka, to the work of Adam “Gajos” Gajewski, creator of Zdzich i Wujas, whom we followed from their military swearing-in ceremony to the investigation into the murder of Misiark’s hen; the laid-back Jeż Jerzy, spinning his skateboard on the aerodynamic domes of skinheads; the depression of the child protagonists of Cichy Kącik KRL-a; and finally Bartosz and Tomasz Minkiewicz’s Wilq, the most frustrated superhero in the country, who’s been shining like the whites on an HDR TV ever since his debut in “Produkt”.
Back to menu ↑Humour Section pt. III
Add to the mix those titans of the bold black line, laureates of this and that, wranglers of splendour: Ernesto Gonzales and FiL, and we’ve got a dream line-up, seasoned to perfection.
Back to menu ↑Action Section
The little action romps I wrote for “Produkt” were a big, juicy creative kiss blown towards… Surprise! Not action comics at all, but B-movies. The kind you rented on VHS, where smaller budgets forced you to get inventive, in genres that rarely picked up awards, unless it was for special effects. That’s how Dren (drawn by Filip Myszkowski), Gangsta and Gudrun (both drawn by Kamil “Kurt” Kochański) came about.
Back to menu ↑Action Section pt. II
Sometimes an action romp was a comic you made just to let rip. Filip Myszkowski’s Emilia, Tank i Profesor grew out of comic-book mania, a bit of artistic muscle-flexing, a love of Lobo, the joy of drawing guts, and complex calculations of blood-splatter dynamics within the panel. Shinear sprang from a fascination with the new wave of creators working in American comics around the turn of the millennium (like Skottie Young, Eric Canete and Bachalo) and an attempt to nail “that” line!
Back to menu ↑Action Section pt. III
Josephine and Toshiro by Clarence Weatherspoon (a basketball player hiding behind the pen name Janusz Pawlak), two of the most technically accomplished series in the magazine, went on to receive collected editions, while the First Mechanical Man made it across the Atlantic, where Dark Horse published Toshiro.
Back to menu ↑Journalism / Features
To our wordsmiths, Krzysztof Mirowski, Łukasz Chmielewski, Piotr Mirski, and our guest writers: I don’t know if there’ll be room for this podpasek, so I’ll keep it short. Let the record show that you did a brilliant job introducing our readers to the crème de la crème of comics, film, music and games back in the pre-broadband days! You made our bubbles bigger!
Back to menu ↑The Acid Zone
Strefa Kwasu was born at Studio Bonin in Poznań. It was late, the air was thick with smoke and stank to high heaven, and a whole bunch of us were crammed into the living room of a prefab concrete flat. Rafcio had come down from Sopot, drew a little guy, we snorted with laughter, and just like that, the magazine had a new section.
Back to menu ↑About Produkt
Putting together an exhibition this huge, especially the section about the magazine itself and the people who made it, meant diving deep into the archives—some stretching back more than 25 years, to an entirely analogue age. Sure, it’s handy to have everything two clicks away in the right folder, but that wasn’t the case here. I donned a diving suit straight out of a JRPG and descended into the depths of the chest where I keep the magazine’s archives in crumbling paper folders. I hadn’t looked inside them for years and honestly had no idea what to expect. All I remembered were the materials from the first four issues that Martinez had handed over in 2020, when we were working together on animation for a certain game.
Back to menu ↑About Produkt pt. II
I think what I felt while going through those archives mirrors what you’re feeling now, dear visitors. It was as if I were seeing those cover designs, drawings and photocopies for the very first time. Scattered pieces of the memory jigsaw clicked into place: faces came back, moments, sometimes even smells (mostly whiffs). It slowly began to dawn on me that what the crew and I had pulled off over just a few years, across those 23 original issues, was a colossal amount of work—more than my older self can imagine. Youth does have its privileges: it bends time and space, lets your body run at a pace that these days just makes me snort and roll over in bed.
Back to menu ↑About Produkt pt. III
Feast your eyes on the drawings, crane your necks over the letters, and keep your mitts off the glass. I lugged a fair chunk of what you see here on my own back, from city to city across two countries, for over two decades.
Back to menu ↑Postprodukt
After the magazine ceased publication in 2004 (an ending that, as history would show, was only an illusion), its creators continued their storytelling adventures across all sorts of fields, well beyond comics. To this day, we work in animation, game development, advertising and book illustration, including children’s books. The Produkt crew are still producing!
Back to menu ↑Postprodukt pt. II
Comics are what interests all of us gathered here most, obviously. The crew have put dozens of books out into the world, including new adventures for characters who made their debut in “Produkt”, created by Marek Lachowicz and the Minkiewicz brothers. Osiedle Swoboda got a second lease of life as a series, then in OS: Centrum. KRL took the market by storm with Łauma, reprinted time and again. FiL became the undisputed god of the Polish indie scene, bringing Bazgrolle to life and channelling his love of rough-and-ready comics into the idea behind Złote Kurczaki. Filip Myszkowski branched out into painting, 3D modelling, music and skateboard tricks.
Back to menu ↑P-Lux
“P-Lux” arrived two decades too early. The idea behind this spin-off of sorts was to draw on the tradition of mainstream comics magazines, but with a “Produkt” twist—meaning we still swear a bit. Sadly, for various reasons, the venture folded after two issues that came nowhere near paying for themselves, before it could take the shape I’d dreamed of.
Back to menu ↑Produkt and Its Reception
“Produkt” got plenty of coverage and sparked plenty of talk, even in the bigger-circulation press, especially around those first few issues, when the shock of “Wait, you can do that?” was still going strong. The first pieces flowed from the fingertips of Kuba Demiańczuk (now in the culture section at “Polityka”) and Szymon Holcman, before he became one of the people steering Kultura Gniewu’s publishing programme. I know those articles helped “Produkt” draw quite a crowd into comics, by the standards of our tiny market. Sometimes they even brought back people who’d drifted away from the medium because they couldn’t find anything in it that interested them.
Back to menu ↑Produkt and Its Reception pt. II
The magazine’s reception and the buzz (a little hum?) it generated may have stirred a twinge of envy among our older, more experienced—and more technically accomplished—peers: the women (you could count them on one hand) and the men (you’d need a few more hands for them). That enthusiasm in the press resurfaced years later, in attempts to get to grips with whether the magazine had influenced the local scene. And if so, how much? I still can’t get enough distance to judge how far the ripples spread when we lobbed that great lump of rock into our little pond. My gut tells me they travelled quite a way, given that you’re here, dear visitors, in this very spot, joining us on this incredible adventure.
Back to menu ↑Neoprodukt
And just like that! Twenty years gone. I never expected to find myself back in the exquisitely uncomfortable editor-in-chief’s chair, but then Marcin entered the game. First he talked Szymon from Kultura Gniewu into it, then me, then everyone else from the original crew (for #24), and then the younger and older members of the new comics generation (#25). Thanks to all that manoeuvring, Arkadiusz “Kirkor” Klimek joined the magazine with Baby Day, our joint comic that was supposed to appear back in 2004. And the rest of the crew got to show off the skills they’d honed over the past two decades.
Back to menu ↑Neoprodukt pt. II
In my humble opinion, #24 was the best issue of “Produkt” the original crew ever put together, and that’s a hill I’ll die on.
Back to menu ↑Neoprodukt pt. III
With #25, we had the chance to make more room for the women making comics, who are now an integral part of the scene, and we finally got to feature an extraordinary piece from Joanna Karpowicz’s Anubis series on the cover. And chances are, we’re not done yet.
Back to menu ↑Studio Bonin
I’m glad you can be here, body and soul, in this recreation of the place where we put together the issues that saw the debut of, among others, Kamil “Kurt” Kochański with Gangsta. And you, dear visitors, should be thankful this recreation doesn’t include the smells that accompanied our creative efforts at Studio Bonin.
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