In my second blog “Under the street light”, I’ve written how I started collecting Janusz Christa’s strips from the newspaper Wieczór Wybrzeza. The story that Wieczór was publishing then, was one of his longest-ever Polish comics, “W kosmosie”. For me, this story marked a switch for me from being one of the thousands of daily readers of “Kajtki”, to becoming a serious (and unstoppable) collector of Christa! I remember it was on July 29, 1968 (the very day I started collecting), that Kajtek and Koko got stuck in their little space capsule, empty of fuel, almost out of the air, and fast-diminishing hopes for survival. From that day on, I found myself sitting there with them, stuck in the confines of the mini-space vehicle, surrounded only by the silence of the empty space and… my vivid imagination.
A copy of a page from “W kosmosie” (In Space) story, which coincides with the day I started collecting Christy’s daily episodes from Wieczór newspaper.
Now, let’s go fast-forward, 55 years later, to a little town in central Australia. This week I came to a point in my story where I attempted to describe a terrible event from my real life (when I was in my early twenties living with my Indian guide – Kenneth in the Yukon). As I was pondering how to illustrate a particular moment so vividly embedded in my memory, I suddenly remembered that in my W kosmosie album, it was already (and always) there! So in this particular instance, I decided to use most of Christa’s first illustration from strip #77 (and doing so, celebrate this uncanny 55 years full circle).
Excerpt from my journal, Yandoit, Australia 2023.