Stripburger #55

Dear readers,

this issue of Stripburger is impregnated with such particular and peculiar tones that you won’t even notice that this time we feature no color pages in the middle.

Last South American harvest of comics has been bountiful and we didn’t want to overlook some other artists who deserve to be published and read. These were Manuel Gomez Burns(Peru) with his eye-hitting comic and Brasilians Darlan William Ribatski, Laura Teixeira, André Ducci, Lucas Gehre and Fernando de Almeida. Each of them is a world by himself or herself, so they contribute a good portion of southamerican diversity and variety. A special landmark here is DW Ribatski with his longer story about the porn ambulance. No, it’s not what you may think.

You can also enjoy some other foreign artists: a simple, but very lifelike Gabriel Dumoulin, while you’re already acquainted with Janek Koza from Poland (featuring a  comic about an alternative commuting route) and Vhrsti from the Czech Republic with his smartypants homunculus. Needless to say, it is to everyone’s pleasure that Vhrsti was actually discovered by yours truly, Stripburger.

This issue is also featuring many different Slovenian artists, too, from the adventurous Gašper Rus, Koco with his potrayal of an average snail’s problems, and retroavantgardistic Kaja Avberšek to the bizarre comic by the master Milan Erič, Mina Fina’s take on Čučnik’s poem ‘The Scent of Tea’, boldly artistic Saša Kerkoš and Martin Ramoveš’s page from his full page comic set, while the debutant in this issue is Miha Ha  with his cute story of the girl and the magical ladybug.

A special place in the magazine is dedicated to the cover, the restaurated comic ‘Vzemite si čas’ (‘Take your time’) and the interview. Helena Klakočar, the author of ‘Nemirno morje’ (‘Passage en douce’) has drawn the cover (spread to see the whole picture) and replied to our questions about her work. Besides that, we’ve pulled her comic, dated 1989, from the depths of the archives of the magazine Mladina, where it was being published page by page every week, and restored it, so that you can enjoy it in its entirety in Stripburger. Thus you are being served a good portion of the view »behind the scenes« of her work and of her graphic novel, awarded in Angouleme.

For the always curious there’s also lots of reviews and meditations on the comics in general. We now have a new critic with us, namely Ana Bogataj, who wrote about female slovenian comic artists, while the rest of us editors is also wielding sharp analitical tools and dissecting the heights (and the lows) of domestic and foreign comics.

Have a pleasant reading and bon appétit!