Kasia Babis spins gold with every comic she publishes at The Nib. The 26-year-old artist from Warsaw, Poland has a knack for summing up complicated political arguments into pithy four-panel punchlines: her comics about the alt-right, disbelieving sexual assault survivors, and even tax reform have all gone viral around the world.
Kasia started drawing comics as a kid. “I remember carrying around notebooks filled with little stories I was drawing in school, often getting troubles with teachers, who would rather see me paying attention to the class,” she says. She filled sketchbooks with illustrated stories about magic, dragons, elves and fantastical political intrigue. In college, she started publishing comics online, mostly about her own life. But she never steered clear of political topics. “My life was not seperate from the issues of inequalities, discrimination, and injustice, those topics started to occure naturally,” says Kasia. “And when people started pointing that out, I thought I might as well embrace it and take a stand.”
She was especially inspired by massive abortion-rights protests in October 2016. Poland, which has a right-wing government and most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, was debating a new bill that would prohibit abortion in all cases — no exceptions. Thousands of women dressed in black, a traditional symbol of grief for lost independence, and took to the streets in cities across Poland. “The bill was rejected and it was the first time I’ve ever felt truly empowered. When I’ve felt my actions actually mean something,” says Kasia.
While many cartoonists prefer to hunker down in isolation, Kasia finds “maybe too much” pleasure in that debating politics publicly. “It’s like a sport to me,” she says. “But I only engage into conversation when I see an actual interest in it on the other side.” Public media outlets in Poland are tightly controlled by the government, which is known for cracking down on left-leaning voices. This month, Kasia notes, Polish police arrested 51-year-old artist Elzbieta Podlesna for “profanity” for creating a poster where the Virgin Mary is surrounded by a rainbow-flag halo.
Kasia is part of a movement of Polish artists who continue to create thought-provoking political art despite censorship and threats of violence. “Artists taking a stand against conservative values are at risk these days, but on the other hand there’s also a huge movement of opposition activists ready to defend them and alert international media of such cases,” says Kasia. “There are still a lot of independent media that government can’t put their hands on, even though they try.”
Kasia is a regular contributor to The Nib. You can read all her comics right here.
