Performing Polish Comics on Wikipedia.

Adopting Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism, the article investigates how national identity is performed in popular culture in reference to comics. The main research source are the Polish Wikipedia entries categorizing their content as polskie komiksy (Polish comics). The main research questions in this context are what canon of Polish comics is performed on Wikipedia and what does it say about the Polish comics at large. To answer the questions, in the first part of the article the proposed methodology and theoretical base, combining Wikipedia studies with banal and everyday nationalism studies, are introduced and substantiated. Then, in the main part of the text the history of Polish comics as it arises from the pages of Wikipedia is reconstructed and analyzed. This implicit history and the canon resulting from it provides an insight into how comics is perceived in Poland and by this into some aspects of Polish banal nationalism. The article concludes with a call for further and more in-depth research into comics and other popular media as performances of collective identities.