This paper investigates the systemic representational absence of Ukraine in international comics prior to 2014, highlighting how visual culture contributed to the broader geopolitical marginalization of Ukraine in the global imagination. The analysis demonstrates how Ukraine was consistently conflated with Russian or Soviet space, and how its historical, cultural, and spatial specificity was omitted, distorted, or misattributed. SvitlanaRather than examining the surge of interest following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the paper focuses on long-standing mechanisms of symbolic erasure in Western graphic narratives. Early examples include Hergé’s Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930), which briefly references the Holodomor without identifying Ukraine as a distinct entity. Methodologically, the paper combines visual, discursive, and narratological analysis of selected comics with a comparative postcolonial perspective, focusing on spatial framing, iconographic codes, and narrative positioning. It examines how invisibility functions not only through absence but through substitution, distortion, and symbolic appropriation. The Ukrainian case serves as a lens through which to examine what is made visible – and what remains systematically overlooked – in transnational graphic storytelling. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions on cultural erasure, epistemic asymmetries, and the visual geopolitics shaping representations of Eastern Europe.