Paukmama
The 1987 graphic novel Paukmama (ostensibly published by Yugoslavian giant comics publishing house Dečje novine) was on sale for all of two days before Yugoslavia’s officially-long-since-disbanded Department for People’s Protection (OZNA) had it quietly removed from the shops. OZNA also went looking for the author, to no avail; it turns out that the entire print run was somehow done without the publisher’s sanction, or even knowledge. However, copies circulated in various semi-underground forums until the final dissolution of Yugoslavia: a sufficiently determined search can today find blurry scans of the novel online.
The graphic novel is a standalone: it’s basically a story about one Paukmama, or ‘Spider-Mommy,’ who goes around helping children face their fears (which usually take the form of one monster or another). Paukmama is herself technically a monster — she looks like a fluffy spider with regular eyes and a happy smile — but she’s presented as one of the good monsters, and is stronger and weaker in the story in direct relation to how much Paukmama is loved by others. The art style is very good (vaguely Jack Kirby-ish), the story is inventive and clearly geared towards small children, and the illustrations have enough occult geometry in them to set off a TSA silent occult alarm from fifty feet away. That last part is why OZNA confiscated the entire print run: the Yugoslavians didn’t know that this graphic novel was a harbinger for a possibly inimical extraplanar incursion, but better safe than sorry.
As for the aforementioned blurry scans, which aren’t crisp enough to have any real occult mojo: well. Maybe it’s an obsessive, but mundane, fan. Maybe it’s somebody looking for suitable recruits for Paukmama 2.0. And maybe it’s OZNA, trolling for would-be cultists. Yes, yes, there’s no Yugoslavia for them to protect anymore. They were also supposed to disband in 1946. It’s not been lost on the members of this organization that the countries that used to be Yugoslavia are just as desperately disinterested in prying into OZNA’s remit as the Tito regime was. Some things, you just don’t ask too many questions about; you may not like the answers.