MisonJun: the comics of Radosna

Comic about fictional students of a real school in Piekary near Kraków, Poland || Comedy + some drama || Absurdal humour, puns and cuteness

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June 2014: Magda's friend manages to miss the end of school year.

Episode twenty-five fully reveals Werka's extremal absendmindedness.

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I believe this episode is when I started the running gag of those three girls randomly making barbecue in the background. You can also see one of the photographer girls with them.

Using cleaning supplies as some kind of battle equipment was a common joke among the students and on those occasions where we were allowed to wear silly costumes there were always a few people wearing toilet paper or carrying mops with them.

T/N: The “assembly” refers to the meeting of all the students and teachers which is the main thing that happens on the last day of school, complete with a stage play by one of the classes and/or the drama club, there is also some gifts for the most gifted students, long speeches by the principals and other important people associated with Radosna, and probably other things which I already forgot. (Oh, I'm almost sure the iconic red armchair that was possessed by one humanity class for all their three years at Radosna was officially passed down onto another humanity class during this assembly, which means all the teachers have witnessed this silly act, but I might be wrong). The only thing left to do at the final day of school was meeting in class groups with the class teacher, receiving the report cards and thanking the teacher with a whole lot of flowers and chocolates (which were later eaten by the teacher's kids, as I found out). I write all of this because I couldn't find the English word for apel and I'm wondering if the English-speaking world even has this kind of galas that end the school years - in American cartoons the kids are just running out of the school, throwing backpacks away (why they even had those?), dressed in everyday attire, as if it was just another day of school. Meanwhile here in Poland the last day of school is always a Big Deal.

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June 2014: Magda's friends prepare the ultimate escape plan, but Werka is stopped by force majeure.

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Librus was the online class register used by teachers at Radosna, and the Eye of Librus, with the tower and all, was part of the end-of-year stage play in the year 2014 - I was amazed by the idea and asked permission from the play crew to include it in the comic. Librus was the first online class register I've encountered, back at elementary and middle school our teachers were using classic paper book registers, but I believe the online version becomes more and more prevalent in Poland. At Radosna we still had one teacher who was well beyond the retirement age and she kept using a paper register, and at the end of each semester she was sitting down during the weekend and carefully inputting all the notes into the online register. I'm wondering how is she doing.

T/N: I used “madame principal” again to separate her from “priest principal”, forgive me this weird-sounding word.

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June 2014 - Magda's friends don't give up and keep trying to escape Radosna.

Episode twenty-third suggests that sometimes it is better to walk to the further bus stop.

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Bandaging test was part of second year's defense training course, other fun things we did in those classes were shooting air rifle and first aid / CPR.

Malbus is a local bus company operating among the many villages just west of Kraków and was the default means of getting to the big city. Kraków's aglomeration bus lines also did drive through Piekary, with a stop located right next to the school, but they were driving only a few times a day, so the malbus was one of the symbols of Radosna life, as the only way of reaching “the world” physically.

I’m not trying to say that the girls were beaten by second-year students, but rather that the boys from mathphys are so tough that simply falling onto them might hurt xd

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June 2014: Magda's friends decide to leave Radosna.

Episode twenty-two shows another great idea by Monika.

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Personally I never tried to skip school at Radosna, but from what the teachers said and some confessions from other students it seems like it's rather hard. Students were indeed hiding in wardrobes, which sounds weird considering how small the wardrobes were. In the big closet upstairs thre were usually several packages with old books and clothing and stuff, and I can imagine it was possible to hide among them. The dorm teacher was checking the whole house before closing it and I would like to know how many different places did they have to check before making sure no one is trying to hide there.

T/N: Is there really no noun for skipping school in English? No single-word noun like wagary in Polish? I had troubles fitting the title on the page...

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May 2014: Magda's friends learn the hardships of becoming part of the elite. ...Actually, it's an episode about puns.

In episode twenty-one MisonJun club gets three new members and a massive number of puns.

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This MisonJun recruitment is supposed to happen at the same time as the actual recruitment for the school.

Kids who want to learn at Radosna go through a recruitment process, starting with open days and including interview with the student, interview with parents, and providing quite some paperwork. I remember they were taking pictures of every student at the interview, and the principal spent all the summer learning the names of every student so that he could greet everyone by their first name when the schoolyear started.

I remember the biolchems were telling quite some weird jokes. I wish someone could translate them for me.

T/N: I took all the jokes from a website called thoughtcatalog.com. I hope they are cheesy enough.

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March 2014: Magda and the rest of MisonJun take part in the traditional historical treasure-hunt game as Team Graduates.

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Night Crusade (actually Nocna Krucjata) is an annual event, a treasure-hunt kind of game played around the whole Radosna campus after sunset. The whole game is organized and directed by the history teacher and each year a new plot is introduced, always based on historical or biblical events. I believe the first game ever was based on the crusades, which would explain the event title, but I never really asked about it. I took part in the event in my second year, but our team didn't even make it past the first task (the game is rather unfair to be honest), so in my third year I took part on the other side, as one of the plot elements - you can see me on the second panel. That year's plot was based on biblical story of Gideon. Together with a friend I was greeting the player teams and giving away a drawing of a goat, which was used as an “offering” at the next task. We had to prepare the goats ourselves so I drew goat-Wolf from the classic cartoon “Nu Pogodi”. Other tasks shown here are straight from that year's game, including crafting a horn from newspapers and crawling through mud. I believe there was a creepy room with some “dying” from a nasty disease, with really cool makeup, but that might have been the previous year. The last task was obtaining a candle and bringing it to the mound without letting the fire go off. At the end the candle was used to light up an idol of Baal, a goat (I believe? maybe a bull though) made of newspapers, to symbolize getting rid of the pagan religion forced upon occupied Israel.

I think the game is pretty weird because only the winning team gets to know the whole story - the game ends when the first team completes the final task. Not even the organizing team knew the whole plot and tasks - we only knew our parts - to stop any player team from preparing in advance. The point of the game is to learn about the historical or biblical events, and I don't really think I learned much from the game itself.

A whole lot of students take part in the game each year, about half or more of the dormitory, since the game is fun, you can do silly stuff with teams of friends until late at night, and staying at the room trying to sleep in all that noise would be rather frustrating. Teams usually had themes, there was indeed team ninja, but also a military team, a cleaning service team, martial arts team and many others - the costumes were basically made of trash because they get destroyed quickly during the games anyways.

T/N: Third panel contains a reference to the Polish epic Pan Tadeusz, Poland's all-time bestseller. I used the English translation by George Rapall Noyes which sounds accurate but sadly doesn't rhyme.

I was positively surprised to find out the phrase “game not worth a candle” exists in English with the same meaning as in Polish.

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March 2014: Magda meets Kacper - a malcontent, but never a defeatist. Episode nineteen about those who complain and then actually do something.

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Mafia is a very popular game which is obligatorily played whenever more than four people meet. If you aren't very sociable you will likely be voted off as the first one, which gives you the opportunity to laugh at all the remaining players who try to figure out what's going on, so it's not really that bad.

Many students who lived in the dormitory had strong negative opinions about the rules they needed to follow. Maybe they were anarchists, maybe they just weren't used to living in bigger groups of people, whatever the reason, they found it fitting to call the school a ghetto. As a person who felt at Radosna like at home I never understood why they don't let their voices be heard by the teachers and only keep those complaints for fellow students.

There were many foreign exchange students visiting Radosna. Single students were usually staying for a whole year while bigger groups visited for a week, followed by the Polish group visiting them abroad. The bigger groups were coming each year from the same two schools, one from Germany and the other from Netherlands. What I'm trying to say is there was never a big group of French students at Radosna and I made that up for fun because I assumed everyone knows Les Miserables.

T/N: There is a lot of text in this one and I am very sorry for that! I know it's not good for a comic to have more text than pictures.

The French sign at the protest basically means “Today we win or die”, but since it's French it is a very poetic sentence. In original I used a line from a patriotic Polish song from the 19th century, and I found out the song is originally a French poem named La Varsovienne, so I took the same line straight from the French version. Considering the presence of French exchange students and the fact that Radosna's humanistic class profiles learned French as one of the foreign languages, this seemed like a better idea than simply translating into English.

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March 2014: Magda learns the joys of jogging in the morning.

Many students of Radosna fell in love with jogging. After all, that's the easiest way to stay in shape, improve looks and feel better. Luckily not everyone gives up as quickly as Magda. Episode eighteen is about Radosna's most popular sport and also about hard beginnings.

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At some point a whole lot of people at Radosna started jogging, mostly in the morning. Never alone, always in groups. To be honest rollers were also very popular, but eventually lost with jogging.

Did I mention before there is a swimming pool next to the sports hall? I might have forgotten because honestly I have never been there.

T/N: At first I wanted Magda to call Monika a “smartass”, but I'm not sure if that word isn't too rude for such a comic. It's hard to tell which popular online words are actually very offensive in real life. I'm not convinced if “smart alec” has the right meaning, but it's meant to sound ironic anyway so I guess it's ok.

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March 2014: Magda meets a new MisonJun member. The evening mass helps her feel better.

The way house 6 prepares music for Radosna's traditional Thursday mass is legendary.

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You want to know what happened at Pi Day? Me too, bro.

Every Thursday all the students living at dormitory are obliged to take part in the 18:00 mass at local church. Being religious or not doesn't matter here and it's still an event that gathers everyone in one place, which helps students form bonds, and also allows the priest assigned to the dormitory to address any current issues during the preaching part of the mass. Obviously the mass served as a reminder that this is a Catholic school, which many students would prefer to forget.

Every week another dormitory house was resposible for preparing the music (5 songs at various parts of the mass) and offerings, which were usually funny symbols of the dorm life like apples or cleaning equipment. Obviously every person has a different level of music skills and having 30 people at your house doesn't mean you will find someone who can sing. Some houses picked easy songs that all the students could sing, other houses picked only one-two amazingly talented singers to do the singing part.

And then there was house 6. Inhabited by boys who didn't want to sing because they knew they can't. As soon as they opened their mouths, everyone present started giggling uncontrollably. There was no way to cheat the schedule, every two months came this mass that was hard to be treated seriously. The “Thanks be to God” part that ends the mass sounds hilariously relieved when the music quality is so questionable.

T/N: The last panel includes a modified verse from a religious song that was authentically sung by house 6 a few times at their mass. The original song lists questions about hardships that happen in life, and all are answered with the line “Trust in the Lord”. Boys from house 6 knew too well how bad they are at singing.

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March 2014: Mathphys class trains hard for the Pi Day celebration.

Episode sixteen is about Pi Day 2014. Ewa Tanktop does her best to guarantee her class the first place at every game.

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Pi Day was one of the many occasions celebrated at Radosna, and it was also part of the year-long class group competition. Almost every month had some kind of tournament, which meant no lessons but every students needed to be present anyways. For example December had caroling competition, June had sports day, etc.

Some of the Pi Day games the classes competed at were: running in the shape of Pi letter (two people run while holding the third one), drinking mineral water on time (listen, our school had mineral water whose name started with “P” so someone thought it's enough to be featured on Pi day), playing some kind of board game that included math questions, solving very hard math exercises, baking Pi-themed pastry and throwing horseshoe (again, in Polish the word for horseshoe starts with “P”). The competitions were meant to be fun and diverse, so that the students from non-science profile classes had equal chances for winning as those who were doing twice as many math hours weekly.

T/N: In original version the Pi letter was replacing two letters “pi”, here it is only “p” for clarity sake.

The pastry from Cinek is specifically gingerbreads, because in Polish it's “pierniki”.

English is the most punny language I know and there is still a lot I could learn in the art of wordplay xD

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March 2014: first-year students start to feel untouchable.

Episode fifteen about the thing that infuriates third-year students.

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The episode is about dinner cards! Every student who paid for full dinners at Radosna (soups are free) received a magnetic card which was checked before receiving the serving. Later a card reader was installed at the main school door to prevent strangers from entering the building. The reader was reacting to the same cards we were using for dinner and quite frequently it was malfunctioning.

The dinner was served at two breaks, after the fifth and sixth lesson, with first-year students being only allowed on the second dinner break - this was caused simply by the canteen being too small to fit all the students plus teachers. First year students were always salty about having to wait additional fourty-five minutes and they frequently appeared on the earlier break, which was irritating to the older students on its own, and when the kids started jumping the queue, older students would take action and point them out to any teacher present.

It's me on the last panel, the author of this comic. :)

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January 2014: Magda sees that she can't see through the fog.

January without snow just doesn't look right. In episode 14 Radosna awaits snow.

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It was just like Kuba says: due to being located close to the big Vistula river, Radosna experienced dense fog every time the weather was getting cold. Walking around the campus at such a weather was an experience.

The last two panels show five real-life students from Radosna, including me (the one with red hat). One time we went together on a trip to see Frozen at cinema, and on our way back to Radosna it started snowing heavily! It was quite funny tbh.

T/N:

There is one hermetic joke lost in translation in the speech bubble where Kuba greets Szczepan. People at Radosna tend to replace the slang greeting “siemasz” (short from “Jak się masz” = “How are you”) with “Siemaszka”, the name of the man who inspired the creation of Radosna.

Also in the same bubble I used “buddy” because I was confused if there is an English word for “a friend younger than me whom I will constantly remind I'm older because that's my right as a second-year student and also we're friends so it's not really offensive” lol.

On the last panel girls are singing a Christmas carol because snow brings into mind Christmas time.

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Autumn 2013: Magda learns about the power of class solidarity and one of Radosna's national sports, the Run for the Slipper.

Slippers, moccasins and flip-flops (but not the Y-shaped!) - what can you do with the most earthbound part of school attire?

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When waiting for the teacher to arrive becomes a bit too boring, people might start chasing each other's slippers up and down the corridor. If you look closely, you will notice that this game is played between two teams.

Marta coughing is a reference to her recent visit at pulmonologist.

T/N:

The text is very cramped in this episode, I’m so sorry for that.

Oh boy, the English language doesn't have enough words for slippers!

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September 2013: Magda learns the price of a sweet snack.

The school shop, calculator search, Kinder Surprise eggs and a bunch of trivia on the characters. This quiet episode was born in the pains of ending semester.

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The school shop offered snacks and drinks, and most importantly it was a popular meeting place. The few vending machines around the school never were as popular, probably because they didn't offer Kinder Surprise eggs.

That “skullcap” is something I got from such an egg. I was very confused about its use and the toy instruction didn't clear anything (those are usually wordless images only), it made it look like some kind of boomerang or frisbee but since it was made of cloth I had strong doubts. One of my classmates looked at this and said it's a yarmulke. Surprise eggs are confusing.

T/N: I made Justyna (the blonde girl) speak in memes and now I regret that decision.

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September 2013: Magda experiences the joys of getting up in the morning.

Waking up in Radosna means a choir of alarms and wakers. Because you can't always hear the alarm...

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The melody played from the church at 07:00, Kiedy ranne wstają zorze, is a Catholic hymn that’s sung in the morning. I've never heard anyone sing along to the music at Radosna, and the melody was audible enough to wake up many people.

All the alarms in the dormitory use popular and loud songs. I was inspired by my own roommate who used a violin piece from Lord of the Rings as her alarm, and she never woke up, even though the alarm kept getting louder. For many months I hated the sound of violin.

Students are required to leave the dormitory before 08:00 and the dorm teachers will check if no one stayed at their room. Dormitory is then closed until about noon. One of my classmates had serious troubles with getting up (I believe he had some kind of condition) and everyday he arrived at classroom punctually at 08:03 - it takes exactly three minutes to walk from the dormitory to the school building.

T/N:

Polish Mother is a trope in Polish literature, we learned about it at school. Interestingly, all examples we had in textbook were deconstructions of the archetype. I chose the phrase because it sounds kinda like Mother of God, a fitting reaction for being thrown out of the bed by the sheer sound volume of your roommate's alarm.

On the last panel one boy shouts “Kuba!!! Alarm!!!” - just in case: Kuba is a Polish boy’s name, short form of Jakub. It looks exactly the same as the Polish name for the country Cuba.

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September 2013: Magda realizes that tackling general cleaning with only two people is not a good idea.

Each Monday evening this nightmare happenes to every student living at Radosna dormitory. General cleaning, which means everyday cleaning except more intense. Each student needs to clean their own room, one part of the common space of the house, and also manage to wash themselves and get dressed in pajamas before 21:00. Although to be honest that might be the sole serious duty at dormitory.

Oh and by the way, Marta is at pulmonologist.

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The parts of common house space had varying levels of “hardness” and needed different amount of time to complete cleaning, especially compared to other rooms that needed to be cleaned at the same time, so of course there were people complaining that they can't clean their duty on time because there wasn't enough people or stuff. Not being home on Monday was sometimes considered betrayal by other roommates.

The “white glove” part is a direct reference to the Polish edition of Perfect Housewife, which aired back in 2013 and was pretty popular, if only to mock it.

T/N: It's really hard to translate “generalka”. I chose “General cleaning” since it looks similar and basically has the meaning, but I wish I could fit it into a single word. Also I had troubles translating the onomatopoeias, I wanted them to sound funnier.

Edzia is supposed to be swearing with the cloud of dust obscuring her speech bubble. Feel free to imagine what word did she use.