Anthropos 56 (1): 197–209 | issn0587-5161 | e-issn 2630-4082
Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia:
From Tautology to Ideology
Mirt Komel
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
mirt.komel@fdv.uni-lj.si
© 2024 Mirt Komel
Abstract. Alan Ford, originally an Italian comic book created in 1969
by Max Bunker and Magnus, soon after its translation into Serbo-
Croatian, gained huge popularity in Yugoslavia. Its ironic take on the
genre of espionage, combined with a surreal black humour and a satiri-
cal critique of Italy and theWest in general, apparently brilliantly trans-
lated as an ironic depiction not only of Yugoslav party politics of the
period, but also of contemporary politics in post-Yugoslav countries.
The article thus deals with the comic aspects of the YugoslavAlan Ford,
focusing on its specific irony and tautology, since both provide a direct
link between the spheres of comedy and ideology.
Key Words: Alan Ford, comedy, Yugoslavia, ideology
Alan Ford gre v Jugoslavijo: od tavtologije do ideologije
Povzetek. Alan Ford, italijanski strip, ki sta ga leta 1969 ustvarila Max
Bunker inMagnus, je kmalu po prevodu v srbohrvaščino pridobil izje-
mno popularnost v nekdanji Jugoslaviji. Njegov ironični pristop k ža-
nru vohunjenja, združen z nadrealističnim črnim humorjem in s sati-
rično kritiko Italije ter Zahoda, je očitno odlično preveden kot ironična
upodobitev jugoslovanske politike tistega obdobja, ki je večinoma vpli-
vala tudi na sodobno politiko v postjugoslovanskih državah. Prispevek
se osredotoča na komične vidike jugoslovanskega Alan Forda, še zlasti
pa na ironijo in tavtologijo kot dvoje specifičnih tehnik proizvajanja
komičnega učinka, ki si jih komedija deli z ideologijo.
Ključne besede: Alan Ford, Jugoslavija, komedija, ideologija
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Alan Ford by Luciano Secchi and
Robert Raviola – in arteMax Bunker andMangus – started its journey in
the revolutionary year of 1969, when the post-war optimism was slowly
fading away and the dominant liberal ideology started to crumble. The
comic book is basically a satirical take on the classic secret agents genre,
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.56.197-209
Mirt Komel
spiced with black humour and cynical references to certain specific as-
pects of Italian society of the period, but also a mockery of certain uni-
versal aspects ofWestern society at large. Although it becamewidely pop-
ular in Italy shortly after its introduction, Alan Ford remained relatively
unknown outside its country of origin, except for one formidable excep-
tion: Yugoslavia. Curiously enough, leaping from capitalist Italy to its so-
cialist neighbour, Alan Ford became such a huge success that even later
on, after the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, in its successor states it re-
mained one of the most popular comic books. Thus, if in Italy Alan Ford
was intended and interpreted as a satire of capitalism, then it is evenmore
interesting to know that on the other side of the so-called Iron Curtain in
Yugoslavia, it was, to the contrary, read as a political satire of socialism,
or even, to put it in ‘Alanfordistic’ terms, as its ‘accurate depiction.’ How,
therefore, to reconcile these two contradictory perceptions/receptions of
the comic book? How can one satire of society become such an effective
ironic critique of two such different ideologies? Rather than asserting a
kind of comic universalism as if comedy is so universal that it can take
on different ideologies and function in different historical contexts – the
error would be the same as if asserting the universal validity of this or that
ideology – I would like to propose a certain particularism of comedy, fo-
cusing on its specific techniques of irony and tautology as two hallmarks
of how Alan Ford functions in these two very different contexts.
Max Bunker’s and Magnus’s Alan Ford
The original idea for Alan Ford as conceived by Max Bunker along with
illustrator Magnus was to create a satire of James Bond, the iconic British
spy, who for the decades to come defined the whole genre in literature,
cinema, andtv shows, and pop-culture in general.
The initial script forAlan Fordwaswritten inAugust 1967, and included
its six main characters that form the legendary Group tnt: Alan Ford,
Bob Rock, Sir Oliver, The Boss, Jeremiah, and Grunf. Group tnt is an
assembly of misfit secret agents, who operate from a flower shop in New
York, which they use as a front for their secret headquarters. They are de-
picted as lazy, poor, and incompetent, yet somehow also intelligent and
cunning, especially when it suits their own personal interests. Their out-
landish biographies are dwarfed by that of their leader, the wheelchair-
ridden Number One or Broj Jedan (introduced in the series only later on
in the eponymous 11th issue, see Bunker and Magnus 1970), who embez-
zles the millions paid to the group for various secret missions while pay-
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Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia
ing a pittance to his agents, leaving them poor to the bone in the process
(Lucchesi 2014).
The now legendary first issue of the comic book, entitled The Group
tnt (Bunker and Magnus 1969a), was received mildly by its audience,
and thus the second issue,TheHollow Tooth,which appeared in June 1969
(Bunker andMagnus 1969a), was overshadowed by the first issue’s fiasco.
However, the reputation of Alan Ford grew steadily with subsequent is-
sues.Magnus drew the first 75 issues, afterwhich hewas replaced by Paolo
Piffarerio in 1975, who was also replaced in 1983, when the comic book
moved to the Max Bunker Press. Currently the comic book is drawn by
Dario Perucca with inks by Omar Pistolato, who retained the same draw-
ing style as set byMagnus. The comic book has been adapted to animated
film and theatre plays, as well as used as a source of inspiration in books
and movies, most notably a low-budget 30-minute animated short called
Alan Ford e il Gruppo tnt contro Superciuk, which was directed by Max
Bunker in 1988.
Max Bunker initially wanted to create a comic book that would not
fall into either of the then predefined categories of adventures and dark
comics, like Satanik or Kriminal (Bunker and Raviola), or funny comics
like Mickey Mouse (Walt Disney), but rather would employ a mixture of
genres (adventure, romance, etc.) held together by the main spy storyline
(Terzi 2011). This pastiche of genres could be read as one of the distinc-
tive elements of postmodernism (Jameson 1997, 64); however, wemust be
precise that inAlan Ford the element of parody still prevails over the pas-
tiche since the different genres are always parodied despite the anchoring
on the spy genre which is itself an object of parody – and therefore it
would still fall, according to Jameson’s own criteria as laid out in his book
on postmodernism (1997), nearer to modernistic than postmodern art.¹
The difference between pastiche and parody is important to understand
the subversive effect of Alan Ford: ‘Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation
of a peculiarmask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of
suchmimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the
satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and any conviction that alongside the
¹ Jameson, in his book on postmodernism, is adamant about the difference between the
two concepts, while pinpointing the historical origin of ‘pastiche’ (as theoretical concept)
(1997, 76): ‘This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (inDoktor Faustus), who owed
it in turn toAdorno on the two paths of advancedmusical experimentation (Schoenberg’s
innovative planification, Stravinsky’s irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished
from the more readily received idea of parody.’
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abnormal tongue you havemomentary borrowed, somehealthy linguistic
normality still exists’ (Jameson 1997, 65). Pastiche is, in short, ‘blank irony,
a statue with blind eyeballs’ (p. 65). Parody, on the other hand, could be
thus defined as a very special kind of irony that imitates a peculiar mask
with its specific discourse, and it does so in a very vivid language that
is far from neutral, but rather engaged, motivated by its satiric impulse
that bursts into laughter as soon as it touches the serious reality it tries
to mimic with its process. Alan Ford is definitely such kind of parody, for
its pastiche of different artistic genres is in function of its more general –
and at the same time very idiosyncratic, as we will see later on – ironic
take on reality.
However, what kind of reality exactly? Alan Ford’s New York is not ex-
actly New York, and neither is the rest of the World that the protagonists
visit during their exotic voyages abroad when sent on this or that mission
(a distinctive feature of the spy genre): reality is ‘seen’ from a very specific
angle, shaped through the substance of the genre that defines what is real
and what is not, which is true also in many other comic books that are
not set in alternative realities but rather in real locations seen from a very
particular perspective (as, for example, the London of Dylan Dog that is
shaped through the lenses of the horror genre). One would imagine that
the world of Alan Ford would be shaped and defined by its predominant
genre so that we would get a glimpse into the secret world of spies, but
what the comic book actually evokes is a world as seen through the per-
spective of class-struggle: ‘Reality as such is first presented as split into
two separate worlds that do not share any “common reality” [. . . ] In Alan
Ford, the central scission runs between the reality of the “poor” and the
reality of the “rich” that coexist on the same spot without really existing
for each other’ (Bunta 2016, 893). The world of Alan Ford, is thus split
through class struggle, where the parodic reality of the poor and the re-
ality of the rich antagonistically collide with each other in satirical bursts
of laughter.²
Point in case: Superciuk, one of the main reoccurring villains in the
comic book series and Alan Ford’s antagonist par excellence.As Ezechiele
²Bunta, in his article dedicated to Crepax and Magnus, argues that there are two prin-
cipal methodological concepts linking Crepax’s and Raviola’s respective approaches in
Valentina and Alan Ford, namely, the ‘pornological’ and the ‘metaphysical,’ the former
referring to the sexual aesthetics, the latter to the above-mentioned split in reality, where,
however, he constantly and systematically avoids the term ‘class struggle’ but rather
speaks of ‘antagonism’ (Bunta 2016, 891–894).
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Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia
Bluff he is depicted as a typical underdog member of the working class,
but as Superciuk with his deadly alcoholic breath as his main weapon, he
is portrayed as a sort of anti-RobinHood, for he ‘steals from the poor and
gives to the rich,’ thus encapsulating both realities as a living paradox or
embodiment of class struggle itself.
However, if one can still understand why such a satirical take on reality
through parody was so effective in post-war capitalist Italy, one cannot
marvel enough at why it was even more effective in socialist Yugoslavia,
as if with the translation from one language and cultural context to the
other something was produced as surplus.
Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia
Considering the distinctive Italo-American character of Alan Ford with
its direct references to local Italian reality with many terms in Milanese
dialect, as well as its open ridicule of certain aspects of contemporary
capitalist society, especially the (anti-)utopic ‘American Dream,’ it is al-
most incredible that it achieved such a great success in sfr Yugoslavia
almost immediately after its first translation of 1972 on an already vividly
crowded comic bookmarket (Draginčić and Zupan 1986), and evenmore
incredible that it survived Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution and kept its
momentum afterwards with its Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian
and Slovenian editions (Patruno 2006).
Alan Ford was first published in former Yugoslavia by the state-owned
company Vjesnik from Zagreb, where the first few issues did not gain
much success until the appearance of the above-mentioned antagonist
Superciuk, translated as Superhik, in issue #25, with his famous motto of
‘steals from the poor and gives to the rich,’ which apparently was read not
only as a perfect critique of American-style capitalism but of Yugoslav so-
cialism as well. Although from two very different, irreconcilable perspec-
tives, emphasised by the two different names given to the same character:
while Superciuk denotes the ‘perverse logic’ of capitalismwhere the poor
are exploited in favour of the rich, Superhik denotes a similarly ‘perverse
logic’ of socialism where the poor are exploited by themselves (and Su-
perhik fits this role marvellously since he is himself a proletarian).
A lot of the comic book’s success in Yugoslavia is due to Nenad Brixy’s
free-form witty adaptation and translation, both linguistic, into Croat-
ian slang, and of course also political in terms of the many implicit ref-
erences to the Yugoslav socialist system (Džamić 2012). Certain pictures
from the bookwere removed or repainted in some editions, while in some
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other editions those very same pictures appeared in the original version,
and unsurprisingly, some ofVjesnik’s editions were occasionally also cen-
sored by the publisher.³ Even Max Bunker acknowledged Brixy’s contri-
butions to its popularity in Yugoslavia, which at a certain point exceeded
even the domestic Italian one, praising him as ‘one of the rare translators
who successfully depicted the black satire of the Alan Ford’s story and
drawings.’ When Brixy died in 1984 the date marked, in many ways, the
end of an era for Alan Ford in Yugoslavia.⁴
If we refer here to Williams’s three-part theory of dominant-residual-
emergent culture (1977, 121–127), and understandAlan Ford as an implicit
critique of the Yugoslav socialist system due to its parallelismwith the so-
ciety of the period, the translation of Alan Ford – in terms of language as
well as culture – could be regarded as part of the ‘emergent culture’ in
opposition to the ‘dominant’ and ‘residual’ elements of Yugoslav society.⁵
In terms of parallelism and satire, Flowershop uncannily resembles the
Kuća cveća, the mausoleum of Tito, and the man himself resembles broj
Jedan or Number One, as noted by Džamić (2012) in his book on Alan
Ford with the brilliant and telling title: Cvjećarnica u kući cvjeća (Flower-
shop in the House of Flowers) (Ivic 2013). However, despite the fact that
the parallels between the Yugoslav situation and the world of Alan Ford
are one step short of uncanny, one must still be precise about where the
parallelism starts andwhere it ends: while the ‘outsideworld’ ofAlan Ford
depicted the other, ‘poor,’ flip side of capitalism, it is only the ‘insideworld’
³ For example, in issue #16, ‘Don’t Vote for Notax,’ a line making fun of distinctively Amer-
ican racism, reading ‘Firstly, I promise that we will get rid of the Blacks [. . . ] This is a
country of the white race, and whoever doesn’t think that way will get punished’ was
changed to ‘Firstly, I promise that we will get rid of our enemy. This is our country and
whoever doesn’t think that way will [. . . ].’
⁴The edition continued after Brixy’s death, eventually ending in 1992 with the outbreak
of the Yugoslav Wars, after which it was Borgis who picked up the publishing rights for
the Croatianmarket, keeping the original series titleAlan Ford Superstrip.Maverick from
Kraljevo initially started publishing for the Serbian market, and in 2003 the comic was
picked up by Color Press Group from Novi Sad. In the 2000s, the original episodes in
Brixy’s translation have been republished by the Croatian Strip-agent under the titleAlan
Ford Klasik, who also published Alan Ford Extra (new Italian episodes), and Priče broja 1
(Number One’s Stories).
⁵Williams, in hisMarxism and Literature (1977, 121–127), devotes one chapter to the dialec-
tical development of culture as the interplay between these three concepts, where dom-
inant elements refer to the hegemonic values and practices of society; residual to those
past elements that still operate within the dominant ones; and emergent to those elements
that go against and defy both the dominant and residual ones.
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Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia
of the Flowershop from where the tnt group operates that portrays Yu-
goslav socialism. If the social dynamic of the group tnt – chaotic rela-
tions, dysfunctionality, bad organisation, incompetent agents – was seen
as depicting the Yugoslav society, then its outside world can be taken as
the Yugoslav ‘outside’ as such, i.e. the capitalistic West in general.
Despite the fact that initially Alan Ford functioned as an emergent
counterculture, it soon gained such an immense popularity that it be-
come dominant soon after Tito’s death, and later on, after the dissolution
of Yugoslavia, residual in its successor states. Attesting to the immense
popularity of Alan Ford in Yugoslavia are the numerous movies, theatri-
cal and other artworks that were directly inspired by the comic book in
its Yugoslav variant: in 1994 a theatre play titled Alan Ford was staged
at Teatar T in Belgrade, and in 2002 Radio Belgrade performed a radio
drama based on the play; EmirKusturica’sBlack Cat,White Cat from 1998
features a character who reads an Alan Ford comic book throughout the
film; Prljavo kazalište, a Croatian rock band, was named after the trans-
lated line from an Alan Ford issue called Broadway; Pero Defformero, a
Serbian heavy metal band, was named after one of the minor characters
of the comic book; as was Superhiks, a Macedonian rock band; in the
1980s the Yugoslavian software studio Suzy Soft made a game titled The
Drinker, inspired of course by Superhik.
Besides these pop-cultural references onemust not fail to mention that
Alan Ford catchphrases become part of everyday slang in almost all of
post-Yugoslav successor states regardless of their (different) national lan-
guages: Broj Jedan is used to refer to any old, grumpy, influential person;
Superhik is used for anyone with a serious alcohol problem; and Jeremija
for someone who is easily hurt, as synonymous for ‘snowflake’; and Sir
Oliver’s line ‘Cijena, prava sitnica’ (‘Price? A bargain!’) as commonplace
for ‘it’s too expensive.’
This last line especially is, I think, emblematic of one of the distinctively
dialectical characteristics of Alan Ford, namely, its ability to express the
true meaning via its opposite, or what was in classical rhetoric referred to
as antiphrasis, or in philosophy as irony.
The Ideological Function of Irony and Tautology
Perhaps the most famous philosophical form of irony is Socratic irony, a
dialectical method of inquiry where, to put it simply, one fakes ignorance
in order to gain an admission from the interlocutor, whose knowledge is
then shown as null and void.
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Hegel, a fan of both Socrates and his method – as Brecht puts it (1967,
1460–1462): ‘He has the makings of one of the greatest humorists among
the philosophers, like only Socrates otherwise, who had a similarmethod’
– developed his dialectics in close connection with irony, which worked
in a similar fashion, for he ‘faked absolute knowledge in order to gain an
admission of ignorance from the interlocutor,’ and whose knowledge is
again shown as null and void.
And could one not regard Alan Ford as precisely such an exercise in
Hegelian irony? The main protagonists of the comic book are comical
first and foremost because they adhere to the Hegelian principle of com-
edy where the relationship between substance and subject as enacted in
tragedy is reversed: instead of the ethical substance affirming itself over
the subjective action of tragic individuals, the comic individual affirms
its subjectivism over ethical substance (Hegel 1997, 1380).While the naive
Alan Ford himself is faking ignorance while in fact enacting what could
be understood as the ethical substance of the comic book, his idiotic com-
rades from the Flowershop are faking absolute knowledge for they are so
sure of themselves even when their own actions collide with reality and
prove them wrong, and this discrepancy between their subjectivity and
reality is the subject of laughter.
The irony, even double irony is, that if in the original Italian Alan Ford
the satire of capitalistic reality was explicit – and therefore comes as no
surprise that it did notmake it into the Anglo-Saxonworld where capital-
ism itself originated and is at homewith itself – in theYugoslav translation
it was only implicit that the Flowershop and its inhabitants were a satire
of socialist society, as if the comic book enabled an indirect satisfaction
of an unconscious desire to ridicule a system that allowed none.
Freud referred to antiphrasis as one of the ways in which the un-
conscious works in order to avoid the conscious censorship of the ego,
where the opposite of what is otherwise censored is shown precisely as
vorstellungs-reprasentanz of the repressed content: as shown extensively
in his Interpretation of Dreams, this process can affect characteristics of
objects or people, thus transforming a small object into a very large one,
or someone whose intelligence is envied in real life appears stupid in a
dream, or climbing the stairs instead of falling, and so forth (Freud 2010).
Or, more pertinently related to our topic, in his book on theWitz, where
a similar process takes place in order to disguise a taboo content in its
contrary by way of euphemisms (Freud 1916), like in one of Žižek’s emi-
nently Freudian jokes: ‘What is a Freudian slip of the tongue?’ – ‘When
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Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia
you say one thing and mean your mother.’ Althusser, who in many of his
works tried to combine Marxism and psychoanalysis, detected a certain
conceptual parallel between the Marxist understanding of ideology and
the psychoanalytical conception of the unconscious, thus paving the way
for his pupils – most notably Balibar, Macherey, Pecheux – and their spe-
cific critique of discursive ideology, where art in general and literature
in particular is understood as a potentially subversive practice of class
struggle.⁶
There is, however, another similar usage of contrary meanings as in
irony, which has, however, a directly opposite function: an ideological as-
sertion rather than subversion of the existing order of things. The direct
opposite to the dialectical use of irony in general and the rhetorical de-
vice of antiphrasis in particular is what is called ‘subversive affirmation’
or ‘over-identification,’ as first employed in performing arts and litera-
ture, most notably in Vladimir Sorokin’s exaggeration of socialist real-
ism in his novels. Žižek later on (2006) popularized the concept through
his contribution on ‘Why Are Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst
Not Fascists?,’ where he discusses the totalitarian aesthetics of the group
and collective as a style that relinquishes irony in order to achieve a sub-
versive over-identification with the dominant ideology. The conceptual
nuance is minimal, but important: in order for such a subversive over-
identification to work, one must, so to speak, ‘take it seriously,’ and that is
also why Laibach denies that what they do is intended to be either ironic
or subversive. ⁷
The most minimalistic form of such a mechanism of over-identifica-
tion can be identified in a special usage of tautology, otherwise from times
immemorial the linguistic tool of ideological conservatism, as attested,
for instance, in the Christian expression ‘God is God.’ Jean-Jacques Lecer-
⁶Althusser (1991, 17–30) argued, most notably in his ‘On Marx and Freud,’ for a parallel
reading betweenMarx’s theory of class-struggle andFreud’s discovery of the unconscious,
both being conflictual theories demonstrating their essential epistemological break from
tradition in their resistance to the dominant capitalist ideology. For the complex rela-
tion between Althusser and psychoanalysis see also Pascale Gillot’s (2009) Althusser et la
psychanalyse.
⁷GregorModer, in his ‘What canAlthusser TeachUs about Street Theater – andViceVersa’
(2014, 86), discusses several such tautological examples where performers do precisely
what the oppressive government directs them to do, often simply copying the gestures or
commands of authorities, thus producing a ‘blind spot’ of ideology, a point of view from
which such performances ‘become subversive with respect to the dominant ideology.’
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cle (2008, 162–166), in his ‘AMarxist Philosophy of Language,’ writes that
a tautology is a grammatical marker of ‘the ideology of consensus’ in that
it ‘deliberately ignores economic, social, and political problems at the very
moment it promises to resolve them.’ If someone, for example, points to
the cruelties of ongoing wars, to the persistent problem of poverty, and
how does God justify all these, the most ideologically conservative reply
is precisely ‘God is God,’ asserting the identity of the Almighty as expla-
nation for the atrocities while avoiding the historical causes for them, and
at the same time implicitly asserting its existence as the ‘Big Other.’ But if
the same tautology of ‘God is God’ is employed by the above-mentioned
Laibach as the title and refrain of their song, the effect is quite the oppo-
site, the futility of such an explanation and negation of its existence, or
again in Lacanian terms: ‘There is no Big Other.’ Conversely, a simple de-
nial of an ideological statement operates much in the same vein, as in the
statement: ‘The one that sacrificed for us on the cross does not exist.’ A
denial can always be only a denial of a presupposed, already existing con-
tent, that is thus re-affirmed through its very denial. Michel Pêcheux in
his ‘Discours and Ideology(s),’ following step-by-step Althusser’s theory
of ideological interpellation in connection to Lacan’s logic of the signifier,
at a certain point notes that there is an implicit identity-affirming pro-
cess at work in the ideological interpellation, and that the symptomatic
absurdity of its ‘evidence’ is shown in its twisted, humorous, ironic us-
ages, like in the following joke: ‘Mr. Tainta, tell us your name!’ Or: ‘I
have three brothers, Paul, Michel, and me’ (Pêcheux 1975, 125–166). By
ironically counting ‘myself ’ as one of the ‘three brothers’ one denounces
the absurdity not only of the elemental structures of kinship, but also of
counting.
There is, in short, a specific ironic usage of tautology that can be best
described as subversive over-identification, and what Alan Ford does is
precisely such a twist of the tautological ideology of interpellation inside-
out so that in the final analysis it becomes its opposite, not an ‘ideology of
consensus’ but rather an ‘ideology of conflict’ that emphasises economic,
social, and political problems, as best attested from the gradual develop-
ment of the following few examples that go from basic tautology to ironic
antiphrasis up until a most direct critique of the ruling ideology.⁸
⁸Despite the fact that Alan Ford is, as a comic book, first and foremost graphical, we will
nevertheless focus on its discourse, thus leaving aside the visual functioning of ideology,
which is pivotal for the comics in general, andwhich, for instance, Bara Kolenc elaborates
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Alan Ford Goes to Yugoslavia
The Ironic Tautology of Alan Ford
Alan Ford has a plethora of memorable quotes that are, as already men-
tioned, still in use in present dayYugoslavia’s successor states, and are also
reproduced on T-shirts as well as recurrently circulated on social media,
especially during voting periods, which already in itself attests to their
political meaning, at least in the post-Yugoslav context.
‘Tko spava nije budan.’ – ‘Whomever sleeps is not awake.’ This is a sim-
ple tautology, a no-shit-Sherlock statement, that states the obvious, and is
similar to another one: ‘Ako kaniš pobijediti, ne smiješ izgubiti.’ – ‘If you
want to win youmust not lose.’ However, look now how this one is turned
about in the following: ‘Ne predaj se nikad, osim kad moraš.’ – ‘Do not
concede defeat ever, only when you must.’ And in the final form the cap-
italist ideology of competition, as embodied in the sports as an allegedly
ideologically neutral sector of society: ‘Nije važno sudjelovati, važno je
pobijediti.’ – ‘It’s not important if you participate, but rather if you win.’
By emphasizing the opposite of the Olympic slogan ‘it is not important
if you win but rather to participate’ it shows the ideological falseness of
the statement via its comic development into its contrary, ‘It is not im-
portant if you participate but rather if you win,’ thus demasking also the
capitalistic ideology of competitiveness inscribed in the very essence of
sports.
Another brilliant, eminently philosophical graduation from tautology
to ideology, can be found in the following two aphorisms from the comic
book: ‘Bolje nešto od nečega, nego ništa od ničega.’ – ‘Better something
of something than nothing of nothing.’ It works best in our languages
because of the genitive that changes the two apparent tautologies (‘nešto
. . . nečega’ and ‘ništa . . . ničega’), thus linguistically deconstructing the
identity of ‘something’ on the one hand and of ‘nothing’ on the other,
while apparently stating the evidential obvious.
And, based on this, my last example, the best political joke ever, with
an ultimate ironic twist in terms of ideological subversion: ‘Mi ništa ne
in her essay ‘Voyeurism and Exhibitionism on the Internet: The Libidinal Economy of
the Spectacle of Instanternity.’ Among other examples, she points to the visual aspect of
tautology in the form of ‘stating (or, rather, staging) the obvious’ in the sense that what is
most hidden is what is shown in the most obvious way, a visual strategy of a lure which is
certainly present in Alan Ford: ‘In trying to grasp what is beyond what one shows me –
an indefinite something that I assume is hiding behind the curtain – I fail again. There is
nothing behind what one shows. For the subject is itself but a picture, a lure, a play with
a screen’ (Kolenc 2022, 201–237).
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obećavamo i to ispunjavamo – stranka istine’ – ‘We promise nothing and
we deliver. The Truth Party.’ The nothing is delivered, and therefore not
nothing, but something, and that is the truth of the Truth Party, the only
honest party in any given republican party-system of political represen-
tation.
Conclusion
So, to return in conclusion to my initial question: how can we reconcile
the apparently contradictory tendency implicit in Alan Ford’s ironic po-
litical satire, namely, that it can serve as a critique of capitalism as well as
socialism?
The difference lies in its ideological function: Alan Ford provided a se-
rious satirical critique of the capitalist system as seen in the world of the
‘rich’ outside the Flowershop, while its ‘poor’ inside – the caricature of its
main tenants – delivered an ironic critique of socialism. The real kernel,
however, lies not in the parody of capitalism or socialism, but rather in
its distinctive use of irony that the comic book demonstrates precisely in
its dialectical doublespeak, that is universal in form, but historically an-
chored in its usage and interpretation (it is, in short and to put it bluntly,
‘funny’ not in an universal, but rather in a particular way).
And to continue on the lines of historicalmaterialism:we have noted in
terms of Williams’s dominant-residual-emergent culture, if the Yugoslav
translation of Alan Ford at the beginning functioned as an emergent,
countercultural element, it soon gained momentum and became dom-
inant, but – with a true dialectical turn in terms of historical Marxism
– one could say that with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its capital-
istic aftermath it again holds the potential to become a countercultural
element.
Thus, in the post-Yugoslav context Alan Ford can still serve as both a
critique of contemporary capitalist society – since most if not all of its
successor states embarked on the neoliberal boat – and at the same time
as a regulatory idea for what socialism truly is: the theory and practice of
class struggle.
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