Fatherland by Nina Bunjevac Review

In Fatherland, Canadian cartoonist Nina Bunjevac relates the short, sad biography of her father, Peter (the Paul Bettany-looking chap on the cover), a Serbian terrorist who made and sent bombs to enemies of his nationalist group, before perishing in 1977 when a bomb he was working on went off and killed him and two collaborators.

It was a decent comic - I liked the main story of Peter, his hard and loveless childhood leading to the major red flag of murdering small animals, before becoming radicalised into Freedom for the Serbian Fatherland. Bunjevac’s black and white hatching artwork is immensely skillful too, creating a lot of 3D depth on the page, even producing portraits that look photo-realistic at times.

What slowed the story down immensely and really bored me was the convoluted and uninteresting story of Yugoslavia and its pointless enmities between the Serbs and Croats (even Bunjevac, who thoroughly researched this area of history, concludes that no-one knows why the two sides hate each other so much).

There’s so much dreariness about what this leader said and did leading to another leader who said and did other things, sides and bitterness growing - even if I did care, I’d still have a hard time keeping up with what was going on over the many years of conflict that blighted this region. And the end result today is that Yugoslavia no longer exists - the country has been carved up into numerous countries: Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and more.

I can see why Bunjevac needed to include all of this material - to show readers why her dad did what he did - but I still came away from this book feeling depressed at how petty and stupid we humans can be about basically nothing and let that lead to decades of needless pain and suffering for countless people.

The parts about Nina’s father and her art throughout are really good, but you’ve also gotta wade through a lengthy, dreary history lesson on a relatively obscure part of the world to enjoy it. Fatherland is still worth a look if you’re a nonfiction comics fan, particularly if you like the work of Joe Sacco.