nsfw tag just for good measure. I had shared this strip in the comments of a post a few weeks ago, so if it seems familiar, that’s probably why. Additional context: the flask looking thing in the 3rd panel is a Hungarian decanter, so I believe the joke is about their preference for alcohol.
As always, stay tuned here on !comicstrips@lemmy.world for a slow trickle out of Jucika comics, but if you want to find more, here’s a good post with a large collection that /u/JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social posted last year: https://piefed.social/post/1258520.
I’m not familiar with how womens rights developed in Hungary, but even from the Wikipedia page it says:
To me that’s a strong indication that the strips are supposed to be critiquing sexism, which means there is a message. Maybe Hungary was more progressive at the time, but in most of the world in the 1950s women had a rough time of things. Showing a strong female character who frequently outwits the men (and sometimes women) around her would definitely be seen by many in that time period as being pro-women/women’s rights.
Just some timelines to support my stance:
Edit: My main point being, just cause it doesn’t feel progressive today doesn’t mean it wasn’t back then.
It was actually the WP page itself that gave me the original impression that the strip was progressive and message-oriented. I think the key point being left out there is that it evidently grew that way over time. So in fact, there seems to be some white-washing going on.
The simplest explanation is probably that the writer(s) didn’t happen to catch the early and middle-stage strips, in which (as I was talking about above) Jucika’s clothes are frequently falling off her, with the usual point being that she’s little more than an object of ogling.
All that in fact makes a lot sense to me, in that it’s extremely common for comics to evolve over time, both in terms of art and style of humor, as the cartoonist better learns how to handle things.
Yeah, that wasn’t the issue for me at all. I give a lot of credit to Pusztai for doing what he could in that more sexist-time, behind The Iron Curtain. Also interesting is that it debuted a mere year after the Hungarian Revolution was launched, then crushed. Not hard to imagine that he played it ‘safe’ at the start, before drifting towards his later progressivism.