This is a book that has traveled around the Balkans more than any other book I own. Somehow, I picture Irena giving it to Jana somewhere around Rijeka, and then Jana carrying it by car or bus to Serbia. In Belgrade, I imagine, she carefully wrapped it in protective bubble wrap and sent it off to Novi Sad. There, the stories simmered for several months in the warmth of my mother’s home before I finally managed to cool them off by the Danube, the first time I opened the book.
Idle Wishes and Antidotes brings together short comics by Irena Jukić Pranjić created between 1997 and 2025. What I found particularly interesting were the linguistic jokes I remember from my childhood. Those jokes somehow traveled effortlessly across the geographical landscape of what had by then become completely separate countries. Irena has arranged the collection chronologically into six sections, and with each new comic she explores new modes of communication and experiments with the comics form.
I easily flipped through the book and read a few short comics. The first one that caught my eye was the one about artificial boobs and artificial intelligence. I immediately shared it with my sisters because the humor simply had to be shared in these times when artificial intelligence has permeated every aspect of reality.
Soon after reading about seven short comics in one sitting, I decided to start again from the beginning and read just one comic a day, hoping to prolong my enjoyment of the book. One after another came stories about the severe depression of a toilet bowl, about going “pm”* instead of to Africa, yes, exactly what you just read. Then Irena skillfully recounts a life event involving a certain Mario and the infatuation of a squirrel. There is also a story about a high school reunion and the anxieties surrounding encounters between people whom wartime narratives had turned against one another. I found this story particularly comforting because the world has not changed much since then.
And so the book made its way to Greece as well, by the time I reached the fourth section, Secret Passage, which contained, for me, the most visually captivating comics in the collection. Colors, formats, references to other media, playful engagement with the reader’s assumptions about comics, and themes that remain important today. Stories about docile women, spaghetti westerns, the fire of love, and raw passions.
What particularly kept me engaged with Idle Wishes and Antidotes is the fact that Irena never settles for a single mode of storytelling. Throughout the book, she changes not only the themes but also the very grammar of comics. At times she uses classic sequential narration, only to step beyond its boundaries in the very next work, experimenting with rhythm, composition, text, and material. This playfulness never feels like mere formal experimentation; rather, it comes across as a natural extension of the story she wants to tell. For that reason, reading this collection occasionally requires the reader to pause, shift perspective, and adapt to a new way of seeing. The experience is refreshing, but it also reminds me of what has always drawn me to comics: their ability to continually discover new forms of expression. In that sense, Idle Wishes and Antidotes is a collection of stories created over nearly three decades, and a reminder of the vast creative possibilities that comics as a medium can offer.
Now that the book has finally reached its last page, I almost regret that its journey has come to an end. Then again, knowing the path it took to reach me, I would not be surprised if one day it set off once more and ended up in someone else’s hands, somewhere by another sea, river, or bus window. Books like this, it seems to me, are meant to travel.
In the end, I realized that it was not only the book that had been traveling. I, too, had traveled through nearly three decades of Irena’s creative work, through different forms, ideas, languages, and kinds of humor. From Rijeka, through Belgrade and Novi Sad, all the way to Greece, this book changed addresses, but along the way it also gathered new meanings. Perhaps that is why I could not read it all at once. Some books simply are not meant to be devoured in a single sitting. They need to be given space to wander a little, rest a little, and occasionally surprise you, just like their characters.
*”pm” – is an abbreviation of the colloquial expression u pičku materinu, commonly used in the languages of the former Yugoslavia. Despite its literally vulgar meaning, it is often used humorously or idiomatically to mean “somewhere very far away” or “off to the middle of nowhere.”
Dragana Radanović