Marta Zabłocka (b. 1980) – photographer, illustrator, drafter, social activist. www.zycie-na-kreske.blogspot.com

AnFau (b. 1982) – drafter, illustrator, photographer and art historian. www.anfau.tumblr.com

Aga Gójska (b. 1984) – cultural manager, illustrator, culinary performer. www.agnieszkagojska.tumblr.com

Beata Sosnowska (b. 1968) – graphic designer, painter, comic book and illustration drafter, multimedia poet, filmmaker. www.beatasosnowska.pl

The Dream Team is a collective of drafters that represent various types of sensitivity and style. They also have differing perspectives on art. The group creates comics and organises related events. In their common work, they refer to their individual experience as artists. The collective inaugurated its programme in 2013, publishing the first Polish erotic comic Tak, super, printed in serigraphy.

Droga do wolności [Road to Freedom] is a series of four complementary stories prepared by the Dream Team members. The artists joined their forces to contemplate the notion of freedom. One of them started by telling a story, and then another picked up where her friend had left off. The sessions resulted in a comic that can be read as a whole or in parts, because each panel tells its own, separate tale. The artists encourage readers to continue the story to reflect their own vision of liberty.

Artists speak about the Road to Freedom:

Marta Zabłocka (p. 62) When I was thinking about liberty, I just ‘saw’ this story and drew it as a comic strip. I would like people to be able either to jump or to stand still with my heroine and tell their own version of the story of attaining freedom.

AnFau (p. 63) My freedom story is quite universal. Even if the girl from Marta’s story decides to jump and break free of the hands that hold her, she will not be free. There are so many mechanisms that entangle us, or ones in which we entangle ourselves. We then act as marionettes, sometimes exhausted, tired and unaware that we just repeat the same gestures and mistakes over and over again – without hope of ever escaping this vicious circle. Even if we manage to escape from others, to escape from the world... All of this will stay with us. The biggest oppression comes from within ourselves.

Aga Gójska (p. 64) I decided to approach this problem of freedom from within, in a very egocentric way. Liberty as something created by the individual, a unique idea, and at the same time a very subjective thing to ‘be felt’. This is why my hero makes his own freedom, one that he can reach through his head. Freedom is as unattainable as our limits of comprehending the reality, and hence this endless work on shaping and breaking away from what we create.

Beata Sosnowska (p. 65) As I was thinking about freedom, I was a prisoner of my own self-expectations, of my own image of what a story about freedom should look like, from a professional drafter’s point of view, in order to sound okay. I wanted ART! And got nothing.

We all know what can be said about freedom; after all, we talk about the exclusion of women from the narratives of history and liberty all the time. We know where to sink our teeth and tear away a piece for ourselves. And still be on trend, safe within this polyphony of excluded stories, of violence, intolerance, economic inequalities, within the left, right and centre of the political football pitch. Still nothing, though.

I knew what to put in each of the panels. But I wanted to be honest in what I was doing, to feel both the contents and the form. Otherwise, this story would make no sense at all.

And this is when Aga sent me an e-mail with parts of her story, full of her characteristic fragility, of nightmares sketched in her subtle manner, of pain. It was a warm, refined contemplation of loneliness. And then I found it, I caught the falling sprout of her story and let myself be carried away. I told the story of this escape. Of the great power of lightness that can balance even the greatest fear. This sprout became my freedom for the story that I prepared. I was not afraid of the child-like stroke, knowing how hard it is for me to set my inner little girl free.