Lucie Lomová
Graphic Novel
Prague, Czech Republic
Lucie Lomová is a Czech comics artist and illustrator, living in Prague.
She has loved drawing and writing since she was a little girl; it has always been her best toy. Lucie majored in theatre dramaturgy, but after one season in practice, drawing and writing won her over, and she started making a living as a freelance journalist, cartoonist, and illustrator.
Her first published comics were a series for children about two mouse friends, Annie and Joey, published throughout the 1990s, which totalled five dozen episodes. The stories from the charming world of Eartown and its immediate surroundings were later published as collected volumes, translated into Spanish, Catalan, and French, adapted for theatre as well as television, representing one of the most beloved Czech children’s comics of recent decades.
After 2000, Lucie began to turn her attention towards adult readers. She created Anna Wants to Jump (2006), a story of a young woman on a crossroad, set in the 90´s, melting genres into a unique mixture, dealing with both personal and "big" history. First, it was published in France by publishing house Editions de L´An 2, directed by the well-known comics historian Thierry Groensteen. Thus began the collaboration with the French comics scene, which has influenced her greatly and brought her many wonderful opportunities.
Two years later, she came up with adaptations of fairy tales (The Greatest Czech Fairy Tales, 2008), which have been published in ten different languages.
There then followed the graphic novel Savages (2011), constructed around the memoirs of the Czech botanist and adventurer Alberto Vojtěch Frič. It tells a story based on real events about how the explorer brought back a Chamacoco Indian named Cherwuish from his travels around South America to Prague in 1908. By presenting the various amusing and unsettling trials and tribulations of this disparate pair, the work thematizes issues of ethnocentrism, otherness, the apparent opposites of “civilization” and “savagery”, as well as the possibilities and limits of intercultural understanding. It was very well received and has also been published in other languages, including English.
Then Lucie changed the genre with a witty detective comic, Knock ´em Dead (2014), using her experiences from her theatrical background.
She also published many short comics in different magazines, like Aargh!, Black, Stripburger, or electrocomics.com, illustrated numerous books, and has been cooperating regularly with Czech TV Web on games and popular interactive Advent and Easter calendars.
In addition to her artistic work, she occasionally teaches. For several years, she taught at the Josef Škvorecký Literary Academy and the Faculty of Art and Design in Pilsen, and now she leads various workshops for children and adults at home and abroad.
Lucie has received multiple awards for her books, most recently two Muriel awards for my comic diary Every Day Is a New One (2023).
She also became a Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters.