Trying to do historiography with Polandball

First I should probably explain what Polandball is and why it is relevant. Polandball is a genre of user generated internet comics where different countries are represented by balls with eyes and the national flag on them. Polandball is a mixed bag like most things on the internet some of the comics are downright offensive or wrong, but a lot of them are funny and surprisingly insightful representations of history and international relations. I learned about Polandball several months ago because my boyfriend spends way too much time on Reddit. The upside to this is that he forwards me the best of what he sees, this is mostly cat videos, but also a great deal of Polandball. I began to realise that Polandball could actually be a valuable tool for getting quick simplified, but memorable summaries of history and politics.

In Polandball the default unit is the nation (the ball), but most comics are about interactions between nations. I started to wonder what different levels of historical analysis would look like as illustrated by Polandball. I have some basic graphic art skills and I couldn’t sleep last night so I decided to take a shot at it. These representations are of course over simplifications, but hopefully they’ll be helpful and/or amusing.

Thanks to the internet in general for the base images.