STRIP COMICS
JELENA ĐORĐEVIĆ COMIC STRIP ARTIST Comics were always only my thing It didn't take much for me to come to love comic strips. And I never felt like that world wasn't for me. Although it was a solitary interest - there wasn't much company with which I recently started the adventure of adapting a local bestseller into a graphic novel, and while promot- ing it I encountered comments from some readers like “I don’t normally like comics, but...” My first reaction to that was - “Someone has robbed you! You’ve been deprived of an entire art form!” is would be similar to saying “I don’t like film” or “I don’t like music”, although we of course all have preferences for certain genres, but we almost never encounter this kind of exclusivity. Considering that this is an audience that already has a habit of reading books, I had to wonder how it is even possible that the entire life experience of encountering comics re- sults in the average reader feeling pure and exclusive dislike. e “culprit” for such attitudes is certainly the person who feels that way the least. ere was simply nothing that appealed to her that so far aroused her deeper interest or pleasure. e problem is the presenting of the com- ic strip as something of a low quality, poorly written, which is only for en- thusiasts or boys. Another problem is the diversity of the offer, which always boils down to the problem of financ- es and publishers, but there’s perhaps also a little of that sense of a “closed club”, some small fence that we erect ourselves, probably unconsciously, be- I could share it, but that didn't matter to me in the slightest
No one chooses to willingly draw the same characters and spaces over and over Niko ne bira svojoj voljom da crta iste likove i prostore iznova i iznova
tween us “comic strip folk” and the or- dinary world. As the complete opposite of the previous stance, there is an attitude that I also share – I love comics! Which means that I really love all kinds of comics and enjoy them. How can one come to love comics? e only ex- ample I can offer is my own. Com- ics were available to me to the ex- tent that they were there in the ‘80s and ‘90s; I bought everything that ap- peared, Bonelli editions (though not all of them, while Dylan Dog was my
favourite), local magazines that occa- sionally appeared, Politika’s Zabavnik, entertainer, which gave us weekly “dos- es” of often very high quality comics. And that was enough. It doesn’t take much to come to love comics. And I never felt like that world wasn’t for me. Although it was a solitary inter- est - there wasn’t much company with which I could share it, but that didn’t matter to me in the slightest. at was only my thing. Working on comics is already something different. The work is
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