We continue our interview series on creators speaking at the monthly Picture + Panel event in Boston, which brings together two comic creators to talk about a specific topic — for September, Štěpánka Jislová and Sofia Szamosi will discuss “the lies that TV told me” about body image, women and relationships.
Next Monday, you can join the creators and moderator Rebecca Hains, Ph.D. for the discussion at the Boston Figurative Arts Center. You can find more details on it here.
Štěpánka Jislová is an award-winning comics artist based in Prague and the cofounder of the Czech branch of Laydeez do Comics, an international organization that promotes female comic artists and their work. Jislová collaborated with Czech writer Tereza Čechová on the 2021 Muriel prize–winning Bez vlasů, later published by Graphic Mundi in English as Bald. Srdcovka (the original Czech edition of Heartcore) received the Muriel Award in three categories in 2024, including the main prize.
Sofia Szamosi is an artist and author originally from New York City. In addition to making books, she enjoys painting and creating art in analog photobooths. Along with her debut graphic novel, Unretouchable (Lerner/Graphic Universe), she is the author of BAD KID: My Life as a Troubled Teen (Little, Brown Ink, forthcoming Spring 2026), a graphic memoir exploring her adolescence in and out of the troubled teen industry. A third graphic memoir is currently in development with Street Noise, focusing on healing from eating disorders and the journey of recovering fertility. Szamosi now lives in a small town in Massachusetts—just the right distance from New York City—with her husband, two daughters, and their elderly Pomeranian, Breakfast.
Check out the interview below, and big thanks as always to Gina Gagliano and Jason Viola, who organize the monthly series in Boston and brought this Q&A series to Smash Pages!
How did you get interested in the lies the TV tells us about women, body image, and relationships?
Sofia Szamosi: When I was little, my mom was a gender studies professor at NYU. She wrote a book called Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s. Her interests and perspectives definitely influenced me. She encouraged me to think critically about how women were portrayed in the media and who was trying to sell me things and at what cost. I remember vaguely understanding that Barbies and Disney Princesses were bad for me.
However, her best efforts really did not stand a chance to the power that is pop culture on a vulnerable young person. . . . By nine or 10 I was deeply brainwashed by television (and movies, magazines, Spice Girls, the streets of New York City, etc.) and my main prerogative was to figure out how to be cool, fun and flirty.
It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I started to look back and take a new, deeper interest in how brainwashed I had become and how that brainwashing happens. Going to school and getting into recovery for addictions and eating disorders definitely helped me look more clearly and deeply at the effects of media in my own life.
Now in my 30s, as a mother to two daughters, my interest in this topic has continued to evolve. I desperately want to protect my children from the toxic messages we are bombarded with, and I know how despite my best efforts I will probably never be able to shield them. So I’m very interested in helping them become conscious consumers and creators of media. I think modeling that is the first step… which is sometimes easier said than done!
Štěpánka Jislová: As much as I remember actually loving waking up at five am on weekends to watch animated TV shows such as Pokémon or Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, I remember with the same vividness how uncomfortable I was with their female characters. It was not as much about disliking Misty or Gadget, but feeling upset with the fact that while boys were allowed to pick from a whole group of male characters with types and quirks, there was always only one girl in the friend group. And therefore, as I saw it, there was only one way to exist as a woman.
Why did you start making comics about these misconceptions?
Štěpánka Jislová: I am a huge over-analyzer, and creating art is a way I can sort out my thoughts, my memories, generally whatever I am dealing with. I always felt pressured by these misconceptions and lies, therefore channeling it into my art, using comics like others use journaling, just works for me quite well.
Sofia Szamosi: I’m a lifelong artist and have always loved making art about my own life and experiences. Making comics about my life feels like putting scary and amorphous experiences into manageable form. It puts order to the chaos and helps me process.
My first graphic novel, Unretouchable, was based on a zine I created in 2016 about my experiences interning with a photo retoucher in New York City. Through the internship, as I learned the tricks and tools of the trade and how to use all the “violent verbs” of Photoshop (cut, burn, erase, lighten, lasso, etc.) to “correct” women’s bodies, I became more and more alienated by the world of digital images all around me. This led me to rethink my whole relationship to social media and media in general.
How are the lies the TV tells us about body image integrated into your work?
Sofia Szamosi: All three of my books deal with this topic.
Unretouchable is a fictional story (based on some of my real experiences) about 18-year-old Olive, recent high school graduate, who is doing an internship with a photo retoucher for a fashion magazine. She becomes more and more disturbed by the world of image creation and the blurring line between real and fake. “Friends I follow, ads I’ve seen, celebs I emulate . . . are any of them real?” Olive asks herself. As she starts to look deeper at the lies we’re sold about what women are “supposed” to look like and be, she eventually decides to embrace being “unretouchable” and “be genuine about her public self, and be public in a genuine way.”
My second book, Bad Kid: My Life as a “Troubled Teen,” is a graphic memoir about my adolescence in and out of the troubled teen industry of the early 2000’s. Eating disorders were a big part of my teenage struggles, and I draw a direct line from those struggles to the lies TV and the media told me about how to look and what to emulate.
My third book, still a work in progress, is about healing from eating disorders, recovering my fertility, and embracing my body as something that was born to transform. Diving deeper into my history with eating disorders in this book has led me to dissect the role of the media in my life even more closely – seeing how as a kid I was immersed in the (sexist, racist, fucked up in so many ways) world of the 1990s, with its deeply perplexing demands to be sexy (but not sexual), eat an American diet (but also have a flat stomach), be an independent woman (but not be too powerful), have a successful career (but also be a good mother/wife/housekeeper), etc.
Štěpánka Jislová: I work with various autobiographical themes, so I often find myself dissecting my childhood, as someone who grew up in the post-Soviet world of the 1990s Prague. That being said, I also do my best to look forward (not just backwards) as well, meaning that in my fictional stories, I do my best to create characters my younger self would be happy to read about.
What’s your favorite thing about this topic?
Sofia Szamosi: Making art about it.
Štěpánka Jislová: I find myself fascinated by the fact that we, meaning millennials, grew up in the same worlds, but our experiences of the past are so wildly different. It’s as if we had spent our childhoods in different dimensions. I can vividly remember the media frenzy about the thinness and the obsessions over the weight of female celebrities, yet when I recount this to my male friends, they have absolutely no recollection.
What’s the worst thing about the lies the TV tells us about women, body image and relationships?
Sofia Szamosi: The damage it does to young and/or sensitive people and communities.
Štěpánka Jislová: I think the worst part is that it tells us that there is only one way to exist. Because let’s be honest, the aforementioned lies are always about unifying perceptions and societal expectations. But people are definitely of size fits all, even if that’s what the lies of the media would want us to believe. On the bright side, once we step out of the normative position, it’s usually easier to defy further. You don’t have to be straight, cis or monogamous, work forty hours per week or buy a new phone every year. You can make your life truly your own.
What misconceptions have you found that people have about these topics?
Štěpánka Jislová: Quite often, I come across the belief that the lack of presentation is not quite valid, because well-written characters are, or should be, relatable to everyone, not just those who share said characters’ visual attributes. And while that is correct, I would urge those coming forward with this argument to imagine their favorite stories with, for example, gender or race flipped characters. And to imagine that, for example for a young girl growing up in the 90s, this was how the majority of stories were presented in the popular media.
Sofia Szamosi: A big misconception that I myself had (and maybe still have on some level) is the idea that we can consume media that we know may be sexist / unrealistic / propagating unrealistic standards / trying to sell us something, etc. but somehow be immune to it, because we “know better.”
I made a weird college experimental art video about this in 2016 called “TV & Popcorn,” in which I recreated different TV shows I had binge-watched (even though I knew they were “bad for me,”) while an adjacent screen showed myself chewing and spitting out popcorn. I believed that if I maintained an ironic distance while watching TV, I could watch without paying… without buying what they were selling. This watching mimics the lure of eating without the “price” of swallowing. Ultimately I don’t think it’s possible to consume media without our psyches paying the price . . . William Blake said, “We become what we behold.”
Are there other media on these topics that have inspired your work?
Štěpánka Jislová: I often find myself going back to Gone Girl, when revisiting these topics. While the book and the movie vary slightly with their focus, I really enjoy Flynn’s view on media, fame and male gaze, through the optics of an uneasy woman.
Sofia Szamosi: I am forever grateful to Alison Bechdel for her inspiring, funny and groundbreaking work, and of course the Bechdel test! While her work does not always directly address media portrayal of women, it does share a rich, nuanced picture of women living their lives over time, growing up and grappling with the systemic sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. that is imbedded in our culture . . . and in doing so creates a much fuller picture of womanhood than what is sold to us on TV.
If you could recommend one other graphic novel to people who love your work, what would it be, and why?
Sofia Szamosi: Blossoms and Bones by Kim Krans is a very cool work of art about recovering from eating disorders and getting radically honest about one’s deepest, scariest parts. Created over the course of forty days she spent in an ashram at her rock bottom, Krans’ book is a testament to the healing power of art, and truth telling in the face of a system that wants us to keep quiet and isolated in our struggles.
Štěpánka Jislová: If you enjoy grounded relationship drama with an edge, I would recommend reading How I Tried to be a Good Person by Uli Lust. In her second autobiography, she recounts an unusual tale of non-monogamous set-up she had with her older partner and an immigrant lover. She is not an author who analyzes her own actions or reasons (which I myself do quite a lot in my autobiographical work), she simply invites the reader to bear witness to her wants and needs, her screw ups and, most importantly, her life as a somewhat odd and non-conformist woman.