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Within and Across the Media Borders who are criticized and ridiculed by the atheistic propaganda in Bulgaria that was supported by cartoonists in the 1960s to 1970s. Religion was conceived as an element of ideological subversion carried out by the “imperialist camp” during the Cold War on the Arab countries and neighboring Islamic Turkey. Chlopicki presents a contribution on the period of the 1970s in Poland, wherein democratic, anticommunist opposition started to expand. Chtopicki reminds us of the unique character of Comrade Szmaciak, developed by Janusz Szpotariski. This caricature metaphorically refers to a spineless character, and it was used broadly in literature, jokes, and in everyday conversations as a negative symbol of the People’s Poland. The question of “Ihe Construction of Marginals and Outsiders” is undertaken in the next section. Lorke concentrates on the processes of social and moral engineering in three different socialist states: the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. He illustrates the relationship between semantic and visual strategies regarding the desired (as he calls it) social order in the period between the 1960s and the late 1980s. According to Lorke, the role of the media was to transmit a consistent image of unworthy and antisocial individuals. A similar motif is taken further in chapters by Angelov and Kassabova. Comparing their chapters, we can see differences concerning the construction of the protagonist in two distinct media—caricature (Angelov) and film (Kassabova). Both authors deal with a concept of hooliganism widely used in the communist propaganda. Angelov focuses on an appearance of a new urban society, accompanied by the disappearance of the old sociocultural stratification. He shows the visual caricatured representations of the Others’ entertainments in the first two decades of socialist development, time of intensive social changes—nationalization, forced land cooperation, fast industrialization, and urbanization. Kassabova analyzes the process of film making, which touches a variety of social dimensions. She investigates the movie from a cultural-historical perspective that treats films as visual and textual. From this angle, Kassabova offers insight into film-making processes, with marginal film makers both creating and presenting their films in socialist Bulgaria in the 1960s. The author shows techniques used in the film to create messages and aesthetic effects, communicating shared socialist values, new norms and habits, and a variety of factors—social, cultural, political, and medial—that have to be taken into account when we talk about this period. In the final chapter of the section, Halmesvirta focuses on the caricatures of the most famous politically independent caricaturist in Finland, “Kari” (Kari Suomalainen, 1920-1999), who published in the leading liberal-progressive Finnish newspaper from the end of the 1950s until the 1990s. This artist and his works are interesting examples of the media providing a counterstatement, an attempt to hit the ruling discourse. 25
