IN FAVOR OF HAPPY ENDINGS: Yugoslavia and Serbia's Bane Kerac interviewed by Darko Macan, part 2 of 2

 continued from part 1

DM: You said that your love of US comics started with Daredevil. Was that the first appearance of superheroes in Yugoslavia?

BK: Marvel’s superheroes first appeared in Zenit in 1967 – Romita’s Daredevil and Kirby's Thor. When it comes to Romita’s Daredevil... You once said I was the only person who ever used the word “cliché” as a compliment. Well, Romita’s Daredevil was in fact just a cliché that was previously used by Dan Barry, Leonard Starr and everyone else. That Alex Raymond male prototype.

DM: Only neater.

A Cat Claw page paying homage to Jack Kirby.

BK: Yes, so you could draw it faster. I was fascinated by the elegance of Romita's line because I always liked to scribble. Kirby’s Thor I found ugly. I only admired the patience he had to draw all that tech. I recognized he was a highly original artist, but that wonky anatomy of his really got on my nerves. I wouldn’t tolerate such depiction of an arm, when someone draws it like it’s made of stone. But I was thrilled with the writing... We had the misfortune that our publication of all those comics was done so out of order that you couldn’t put the whole story together. Daredevil started off with four pages from the second issue, then continued with the entire first issue, then they published the remainder of issue two... It was totally butchered. That was the side-effect of the materials arriving haphazardly on an editor’s desk, and since the graphic editor already erased all the signatures and page numbers... Plus you’d have a drunken typesetter, drunken bookbinder, drunken machine operator. And they weren’t just drunk, they also didn’t give a rat’s ass.

DM: The story goes that YU strip wanted to start making American-style superheroes, and called on all in-house authors for submissions. But only you and Toza answered, with three proposals. Is that true?

BK: It’s true. There was a really long tradition of home-grown comics from Nikad robom, and they needed to thematically refresh YU strip a bit, since it started to get repetitive, and relied too much on reruns.

DM: Was the American model their idea, or yours?

BK: Look, back then you had two types of industrial comics. The Italian and Spanish, or rather European industry, and the American comics industry.

The cover for a Cat Claw collection.

DM: You can also call the French model an industry, only it pretends to be an art.

BK: Well, you see, we didn’t consider Comanche, Bernard Prince or Blueberry as industrial comics. For us, industrial comics were those that were done by many hands: a penciller, an inker, a letterer... Now, in order to increase production, the basic idea was to work that way, so we could get a new episode every month, to fill the pages of the magazine. And that simply couldn’t be done by any single artist. So there was an internal call to create a series where the main artist would do the pencils, and it would get inked, lettered etc., just like they did at Marvel. But, as it turned out, I was the only one of all the artists invited who came out with any submissions. It all came down to Toza and me pitching this half-man, half-machine called Cyborg, Cat Claw and a take on Red Sonja.

DM: Gea?

BK: Yes, Gea. And that was a good idea, it looked a bit like Ghita of Alizarr. She was supposed to be a female Conan, having adventures in some made-up world.

DM: When Toza Obradović appears in the first episode of Cat Claw, he has Gea written on his T-shirt… Was she his favorite?

BK: Yes.

DM: And what was yours?

BK: Cat Claw. Because I wanted to draw Spider-Man.

DM: Why Spider-Man?

A Cat Claw cover for the US publication, published
by Eternity Comics in the early 1990s.

BK: Because he was drawn by Romita, and I wanted to draw something like Johnny Romita. That was my one big wish, until later on, when I had a chance to really try out for Marvel, but I didn’t want to. But back then all I really wanted was to be an artist for Marvel.

DM: Why?

BK: Well, how do I put this... compared to French comics, Marvel comics seemed to me much more fun and breezier, with more humor. There were some episodes of Blueberry with absolutely no gags, nothing light at all, except those goofy bits with McClure. While every third line in Spider-Man was some sort of wordplay, a gag... I mean, you know what kind of humor it was, it wasn’t anything sublime, but...

DM: But was a good counterbalance to the non-stop action.

BK: Precisely. As someone said: “Who’s crazy enough to fight someone and keep on yammering?” Well, that’s true, but it’s really not all that interesting to have a silent page, either.

DM: Before I forget: when did you get the chance to try for Marvel?

BK: Later on there was some talk. [Editor in chief of Forum publishing] Svetozar Tomić was in contact with Marvel, so he asked me if I wanted to work for them, and I said no. That was back in the day when even Spanish artists wanted to draw for Forum, because we were paid much better than them.

DM: You were already working on Tarzan then?

BK: Yes. We were paid much better than even Marvel’s artists. In those Tarzan days, that golden age of Yugoslav comics, we earned as much as, say, dentists did.

DM: So, you achieved your goal of being firmly middle-class?

BK: Whatever, I could go and buy a Dyane 6 car for cash money.

DM: Were you on a payroll when you worked on Tarzan?

BK: We were on payroll and had a monthly norm, plus we were getting royalties from abroad. And if I told you the norm, you’d laugh at how little it was. Eight complete pages a month, or sixteen penciled or inked pages.

DM: Why did Cat Claw start off with a 22-page episode, then continued with 10-pagers?

BK: We started off with 22 pages because Marvel issues had 20 or 22 pages, but then it was too much work for me to draw along with Kobra, so it dropped to 10 pages.

DM: Was Cat Claw easier to draw than Kobra?

BK: Yes. It was simpler, and you can see that right away. In the beginning I literally mimicked Marvel comics, and those first episodes were done with a brush, just like... I really tried to mimic that style of theirs, without too much shading or detail-work. You remember how Gene Colan was a legend precisely because he shaded and shaded and shaded, which other Marvel artists didn’t really do. We didn’t even know that Spider-Man was originally published in color. Over here it was published in black and white. Johnny Romita with that clear line of his, I couldn’t even imagine him in color. When all of us who loved his black and white artwork later saw the original issues – you couldn’t see any of it! Those huge ben-day color dots completely ruined his artwork. I was very disappointed.

A labor intensive Cat Claw panel.

DM: The first script for Cat Claw was practically a copy of Spider-Man's origin. Why did you lean so close to Spider-Man? For Kobra you started off with Bernard Prince, then changed pretty much everything...

BK: We didn’t want that here, because I wanted to draw Spider-Man, and I didn’t have the rights to do it. Cat Claw was an obvious parallel to Spider-Man: he was bitten by a radioactive spider, she was scratched by a radioactive cat, he got the abilities of a spider, she got the abilities of a cat, strength proportional to their body size...

DM: The only thing you omitted was that whole drama about his uncle dying because of him.

BK: Oh, I never liked that.

DM: Why?

BK: I never enjoyed that melodrama. Not so much because of the melodrama, but because of its incessant repetition in every third issue. Even today, every time I read how Bruce Wayne’s parents were coming back from the movie theatre, or see that panel of The Phantom’s ancestor holding a skull and vowing to fight against pirates, it makes me want to jump off a bridge... What else did we want? Well, we didn’t want to have a classic superhero like Captain America, so let’s make her a woman. Because back then you didn’t have that many female characters in the main role.

A Cat Claw cover for Swedish Magnum magazine

DM: You say it’s a superhero comic, but Cat Claw, even though it’s does not veer totally into a parody, has that lighter vibe and humor right from the get-go?

BK: There is humor, but I really don’t know why it’s considered a parody. It’s just a normal comic with a bit more humor. For example, that movie with Bruce Willis, The Last Boy Scout, is that a parody of detective films? No. It’s just a detective film that has a lot of humor. That’s how we did Cat Claw, like Spider-Man, but with plenty of humor. Nothing was being parodied there.

DM: Why did Toza give up after the first episode, and why did you let Slavko Draginčić take over the writing after the third one?

BK: Here’s how it went: Toza quit because he was too busy with Il Grande Blek and other things. That was one reason. The other was that he himself said he wasn’t really cut out for that, he wasn’t able to inject the required amount of humor to resemble Marvel. He would just turn it into an ordinary western. If you recall, in the second and third episode I still clung to all the Marvel stereotypes, plots and layouts, I even had several dumb lines of dialogue lifted directly from Daredevil.

DM: But you say it’s not a parody?

BK: It’s not a parody. Marvel comics are simply like that. In that realm, in that genre, on that level, with those kinds of characters... And since we had to keep up the image of Cat Claw as an industry-type comic, we had to find some scriptwriter. I already had my hands full with Kobra, and in 1982. I also worked on Il Grande Blek and for Pan Art...

DM: And yet you managed to do everything?

BK: Yeah, Kobra, Cat Claw, Il Grande Blek, and so much more...

DM: Since we’re talking about seriousness: what do you consider a more serious comic, Kobra or Cat Claw?

BK: Well, Kobra. We even had some episodes that were way too serious for my liking, like the one where Giselle dies.

DM: Are you totally against any kind of sentiment, or tragedy?

BK: Well, yeah. I’m all for happy endings. I don’t like to kill characters off just to make my comic more serious.

DM: Everybody lives forever?

BK: Why not? There are stories where killing characters works perfectly, where it’s justified, so you really feel miserable, and it hits a nerve... Have you seen that TV-show NCIS, that in the first two seasons featured Sasha Alexander as Kate Todd?² When they killed her off with a bullet to her head at the end of the second season, that was shocking. It gave the show such a tone that it was no wonder later on 20 million people watched every single episode. I was dumbstruck, I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time, it was like a mallet to the head. But I don’t see any reason to, say, kill off Extremity in Cat Claw, just to make some big drama. Or to kill The Catminator, or Battleball... They’re my microcosmos, where all of that needs to keep going on.

DM: Should all series last forever?

BK: No, then it becomes too tiresome.

DM: Tiresome for you, tiresome for the material itself, or tiresome for the readers?

BK: I never had the financial motive to do something in perpetuity, just to earn money. I did most things simply because I loved doing them, and wanted to do them. Even Kobra, with that final episode, “Arizona Heat”, it could easily continue on from there. In the US, or wherever, it would already be on issue 400, or 500, but there’s no need for that. It is the way it is, a finished story. Maybe it could’ve had one more episode. When it comes to Cat Claw, I conceived “Catmageddon”, the final, twelfth episode, I even drew the first page, and that’s how it remained for the past 25 years... The thing is, when I started self-publishing Cat Claw compilations, those were eleven books over eleven years. And during those eleven years I was supposed to draw that twelfth episode, but then it turned into “Well, not this year, I’ll do it the next year, or the one after... Oh, I can’t do it now, it’s this, it’s that...” And so I never drew it. In the meantime, that synopsis written back in 1996 or 1997 aged poorly. I don’t know if you remember that sci-fi movie from 1953, that robot holding a girl...

DM: Forbidden Planet?

BK: Oh, yes, Forbidden Planet. I felt that if I did Cat Claw with that script, it would seem too much like Forbidden Planet, that it would be outdated. I was afraid to disappoint the readers. I’d rather leave something unfinished, than to do some crap just to finish it. And that outline, that story I wrote was quite alright back then, because that’s back when Stonehenge and all those ley lines and warlocks were in vogue. Then there was that movie Warlock, and Dan Brown and the like, and it could’ve worked then, but imagine I did something so old-fashioned today? But there's no way of modernizing it, and still keeping it what it is.

A page from Cat Claw with Kerac's self-insertion
in the role of inspector Cameron Hill.

DM: If you ask me, the original Cat Claw story ended when she kissed Cameron Hill. The premise of her looking for “a man who’ll love her” ends there. Why did you keep going?

BK: I was interested in that quasi-conflict of theirs, a clash of two lifestyles, a clash of two moralities. They actually have very little in common, apart from stubbornness and perseverance.

DM: He’s the first man with whom Cat Claw has a mutual understanding.

BK: Yes, that was all very selfishly done. Cameron Hill was kind of my self-insert. A child’s idea of oneself, really, pretty idealized, although I did admit I was chunky. But my thinking was: nobody gets to have Cat Claw except me. And that was that. I don't know if you've noticed, but I didn’t insist too much on their relationship after that kiss.

DM: After that kiss, she stops being Caroline Connor, and becomes solely Cat Claw.

BK: That was the entire point. If you remember, nobody gets to bed Red Sonja if they haven’t first beaten her in battle. Same goes for Cat Claw. She was in love with Professor Baker as Caroline Connor. She was half-and-half in love with Phil Fireball, and she’s in love with this guy just as Cat Claw.

DM: And that’s excellent, that’s wonderful, that’s beautifully laid out. Only, from then on, Cat Claw doesn’t really have much of a role in her own story. The secondary characters take over and start chasing each other around.

BK: That is, unfortunately, due to the weakness of me as the scriptwriter... I wasn’t tired of Cat Claw, but suddenly I had the chance to develop all the other characters, to make something of them. If we’re honest, ever since the episode with Eithne/Enya, there could've been spin-offs. A spin-off with Shockley, just a bit younger, a spinoff with Enya, a spinoff with Cameron Hill, and I could’ve continued Cat Claw in some other direction... So, at one point I got into the same problem as A Game of Thrones: I had too many characters that needed killing off. But I was so fond of their endless interplay...

DM: The first cover of Cat Claw was signed as “Kerac ‘71”. Is that a homage to the time when Romita did Spider-Man?

BK: Yeah, it was supposed to look as old as possible. A colleague asked me the other day why I wrote in Il Grande Blek that I did it in ’99, when it was done two decades previously? But that was actually my personal counter, the total number of pages. I picked that up from Jules.

DM: Did you always care about counting pages and putting in the dates of creation?

BK: I was always incredibly annoyed that Crtani romani never had anything: no year, no artist’s name, no indication that a living human drew that, when he drew it, nor why. That’s why I would hide the dates in the grass, among the leaves, or in the license plates.

DM: How many times did you rewrite the dialogue in Cat Claw?

BK: Once. I needed to, at least in some cases. I forgot what line it was it in the first version, but in the second I mention Tarja Turunen and Nightwish. Even that’s outdated now, it should be changed into something more contemporary.³

DM: Why did you change the dialogue?

Cat Claw's rogues gallery.

BK: First, there was a practical reason, and second, I didn’t like how the dialogue in the first version was copyedited for the magazines. Let’s get to the practical reasons first. The collected editions had computer lettering, with neat letters, correct spacing and kerning, and when we put the original text in those speech bubbles, we got a lot of empty space left. That looked really ugly to me, so I had to fill it up with something, and got chatty. Some readers didn’t like it, while the others were thrilled. It would usually take you 10-15 minutes to read a 10-page episode of Cat Claw, and now you need almost half an hour. You have plenty to read and plenty to look at.

DM: In Cat Claw you also added older Bane’s comments directed at younger Bane, pointing, for example, that you drew something poorly.

BK: Those are just bouts of self-criticism, because now I find it funny how I could even do some of that. “How could you draw this, where did you even see anything like this?!” It’s, how should I put this, some sort of background communication... For example, it would thrill me when in Hitchcock’s films he himself would show up in some irrelevant scenes. The presence of the author in the work is really important to me. It’s not enough for me to draw something, I need that sort of connection with the readers. I need to really be present in the comic. I would often draw myself and my friends, I never shied away from that.

A catfight scene from Cat Claw.

DM: But you haven’t changed the artwork when you published Cat Claw as a book series? I don’t mean retouching the things you had to previously change for the US publication.

BK: I think I changed two or three major mistakes. For example, in the third episode I made Cat Claw’s head smaller, because it was drawn way too big. That page where she first shows up in her Cat Claw costume, that last image, it had Cat Claw in a bikini, with fishnet stockings. That’s where I drew her head too big, so I shrunk it down a bit digitally. Otherwise, I’m not that ashamed of my drawings. I know I did a lot of dumb stuff back when I was younger... and not just then, I still do them!

DM: What I meant to ask is, why did you go on to correct the text, and not the artwork...? What’s your relationship with the text, and what’s your relationship with the artwork?

BK: Well, the text that was published in our magazines was usually butchered by the copyeditors. For example, there’s a line of dialogue in Kobra that I hope I get to correct in the collected edition one day, where at one point they talk about Yugoslavia. Cindy and Kobra are sitting in the truck, and that tiny driver asks them: “Where are you guys from?”, so Kobra says: “From Yugoslavia”. That’s where I made this small gag when the guy asks: “Where’s that, Africa or Asia?”, and then that huge Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the one who was always silent...

DM: ...says: “Non-aligned”.

BK: See, that line where he says “Non-aligned” used to be “Tito”. But, like, it wasn’t appropriate to mention Tito’s name. “Non-aligned” was a good solution, but I wanted to make a point there how Tito was well-known throughout the world. Anyhow, I never really got into politics. In Cat Claw there is literally just one speech bubble of explanation, once our civil war started, where I presented this war in Yugoslavia as just one giant idiocy. But that was written back in the day, when it still didn’t seem like it’ll all turn sour, back when we could still joke about it. That’s probably the only political commentary I ever put in a comic, because I really don’t care for politics in comics.

DM: So that they could be read in any context? But you still changed the musical references?

BK: It depends on how they’ve aged. Cat Claw books were published in the 2000’s, and all the musical references in the original comics were from the 80s.

DM: You don’t consider them an artefact of their time?

BK: No. Some things stayed in, of course. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich will always stay in. Even though when it comes to popularity, they’re not on the same level as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

DM: Speaking of levels... where would you put yourself, when it comes to the world of comics, on which level?

BK: Well, certainly not amongst the stars. Let’s say I’d put myself among the solid professionals.

DM: Who do you see as being on your level?

BK: Am I now supposed to praise myself and be totally uncritical? I’ll just say the first name that pops in my mind. Let’s say, Tony DeZuniga. Tony DeZuniga was never at the very top, but he was a professional and solid artist. Who else...? Victor de la Fuente, for example. I personally think he’s a much better artist than I am, but the poor guy never had a script that would get him to true stardom, so he forever remained a tried-and-true professional. Let’s say I am on the level of some better artists from Bonelli's stable. If I had to compare myself with the French, then I’m akin to the guy who did Ric Hochet.

DM: Tibet.

BK: Tibet. That’s my level. I mean, I wouldn’t be ashamed to compare myself to Hermann’s early Bernard Prince. With the caveat that he, being a much better artist than me, solved some things in an original manner, while I would solve them by looking at his stuff, or someone else's. I came up with much fewer original solutions than those truly great artists. That’s the main difference. That is why I’d put myself on the level of a really good pro, who can draw you a comic following any script you can imagine.

DM: So, the difference is in originality? Why do you think you lack it, and how much of it do you lack?

BK: Well, I don’t lack it, I have enough of it, just not as much as they had it. It’s the difference between a good actor and a really good actor.

DM: What do you mean when you say Hermann had good solutions? That he laid out each panel in a way nobody had before him?

BK: Well, not quite every panel, but he had very unusual angles. Look at his angles in Comanche, he really nailed it there. For example, he shows you that ranch from above – and he puts in some buckets, chickens, pigs, things that would never cross my mind. That’s why I made an homage to that pig in Tarzan, if you recall: Tarzan steals a pig from some farm, and gets chased by Hermann himself. So, I’m a good interpreter, and I’m good at making my own interpretation of someone else's ideas. I can even come up with original solutions, but since I’ve more or less always worked in commercial comics, I never had the drive to create some kind of masterpiece, to come up with something no one else did before me.

DM: How would you define “commercial comics”?

BK: I define it like this: getting a script, drawing what the writer wrote down, not rocking the boat, doing it in time and well, to fit the profile of the publication it was intended for. I won’t try to trick the publisher, do a shoddy job or whatnot, I’ll do it by the book, with a certain dose of originality, but on a different level and in a different manner, without putting in in-jokes or my famous onomatopoeias, with which I infected all the artist from these parts. So, it’s not that I lack imagination, but here’s a simple example: the guy who did Aldebaran?

DM: Leo.

BK: Leo. It’s pointless to compare my imagination to his. It’d be like Ritchie Blackmore comparing himself to Mozart. They’re on completely different levels, even though they’re both geniuses.

DM: When did you start working for Ervin Rustemagić's Strip Art Features?

BK: In the Nineties. He had connections, he was selling Bernard Prince and some other comics to the Swedish magazine Magnum Strip, so he offered them Cat Claw. And you know what happened at one point? Cat Claw won the yearly poll for the best comic three years in a row, ahead of Modesty Blaise, Axa, Tank Girl and all the rest of them. Wow! So, in Scandinavia Cat Claw measured up to the heroines that came before her. Then came the war. I took Kobra and Billy the Spit⁴ pages to Ervin in Sarajevo, to have them scanned on the rotating drum scanner, and I brought the scanned Cat Claw pages back home, to Novi Sad. Two weeks later – the war breaks out. Ervin’s studio, with all the original pages, was destroyed. It burned down. Ervin was stuck there, his work drying up, because that’s how it goes in the world of business: long absent, soon forgotten. Magazines quickly got used to finding other ways of obtaining the necessary quantities of comics.

DM: This might be a stupid question, but couldn’t Ervin foresee the war? Did he think it won’t happen, so he didn’t evacuate in time?

BK: It’s not a stupid question. He was a naïve Yugoslav, just like all of us. He thought it can’t last long, they’ll shoot a bit here and there, and then there’ll be a solution. It never crossed his mind that Sarajevo would be closed off, so he stayed. But when grenades literally started flying into his living room, he put his passport and everything else that could fit in one plastic bag, grabbed his wife and kids by the arm, and ran across the field to the Holiday Inn. So that’s where he stayed until they got him out. And it was Hermann and his buddies from America who got him out of there. It wasn’t easy to get a man out of Sarajevo back then. It cost them a lot of money. That’s no secret.⁵

DM: So, the war broke out, the original pages were lost...

BK: And Ervin lost touch with all of his clients. But somehow, I don’t remember via whom or what, I got a letter... The Swedes were trying to get in touch with the Serbian author who did Cat Claw, because they lost contact with Ervin. No emails back then, just fax machines. I wrote back to them and continued collaborating with them on Ervin’s behalf, then Ervin managed to get back on his feet, so it all started anew... And soon enough all those old connections were back up and running.

DM: Were you planning on working on Cat Claw indefinitely?

BK: No.

DM: Did you have an ending in mind?

BK: No. Not even close. I never thought I’d do it indefinitely, but I never thought about stopping. I’m a... how do I put this, an adaptable guy.

DM: So why did you stop?

BK: I stopped doing Kobra because it wasn’t modern anymore. Road-movies, that whole Smokey and the Bandit shtick, stopped being popular. That’s why I thought Cat Claw would also reach its expiration date. But it didn’t. Even today people like reading it.

Ervin Rustemagić, Hermann Huppen and Sergio Aragones's cameos in Cat Claw.

DM: And it reads well. Do you know what’s my favorite thing about Cat Claw? That feeling that you are having fun the whole time... In comics you can always tell when the author is having a good time.

BK: True. It’s like a Gamma Ray concert, when you see that they’re enjoying what they’re playing, they’re not playing just to get it over with.

DM: Why did Cat Claw stop? And at which point?

BK: It stopped at the point I had to do certain other jobs for money.

DM: The Swedes weren’t paying enough money for you to make a living?

BK: Cat Claw paid less than, say, Dark Horse’s page-rate. That’s one reason, and the other is... if you get a hundred dollars for doing pencils on Ghost, and you get a hundred dollars for a complete page of Cat Claw, which required four to five times more work, and you’re stuck in Serbia, which is going through a crisis and the average paycheck is two dollars, plus you have two kids... then, screw it. Economy’s a tricky thing. Anyhow, in 1996 I worked solely for Dark Horse, riding that wave for however long it lasted. At one point they imposed sanctions on us, so the prescribed rule was that American companies shouldn’t do any business with Serbia, but all this went via Ervin, who had a really good working relationship with Dark Horse. I was also signing my work with “HM Baker”, and not with “Bane Kerac”, so I could still work, right up until the moment they figured out we’re in such a shitty position that they could treat us like Afghanistan, and concluded they we should be happy with an Afghanistan-level pay. So they bumped me from, whatever, two hundred dollars per page, down to sixty. That’s when Ervin asked me what to do, should he accept it, and I said: “No, tell them to stuff it!” And he told them to stuff it.

A page from Ghost (script by Eric Luke, pencils by Bane Kerac,
inks by Bernard Kolle). © Dark Horse Comics

DM: I never read Ghost, but Bernard Kolle, the inker on that series, sent me photocopies of those pages pre-lettering. They look really nice.

BK: They do look really nice, but the writer was, at least according to my taste, a sick man. People who make Se7en and films like that... that can’t be normal. Maybe to someone else, but not to me. Today’s kids don’t mind it, they’re used to it, but I’m and old-fashioned guy. In Ghost I came across attempted incest, psychopaths, S&M... I really couldn’t stomach it.

DM: So, you have very firm moral principles what should and what shouldn’t be in comics?

BK: They’re not firm moral principles, they’re Balkan principles. I just can’t stomach certain things. How should I put this, there’s that scene in the first Conan movie, when we only see a close-up of a mother’s hand holding the child, and when that guy chopped off her head, you only saw a shadow, not even the head rolling down. I found that scarier, more poetic and more explicit than all these decapitations in modern movies, when they even show you the blood squirting from the aorta. And with such preconceptions, I’m being forced to draw Ghost, where in one issue the main character magically combines two criminals into something like conjoined twins? I could barely draw that.

DM: Apart from that, what was your collaboration with the American market like?

BK: Really good. They never nitpicked too much, though I never tried to be too clever either, so I didn’t have any real problems.

DM: So, you were through with the US once they lowered your fee... when was that?

BK: I drew some seven or eight issues of Ghost, right up until the sanctions NATO imposed on Serbia. The bombing was in ’99... So, let’s say right up until 1998.

DM: And you stopped doing Cat Claw for Magnum...⁰

BK: I couldn’t do both. This was really a huge workload. And then Magnum got cancelled... All the editors were young and wanted to go on, but the old geezers ruined it by selling Magnum and that entire production to Egmont, who immediately shut it down, so as to eliminate competition for its own publications. Then I started doing all sorts of odd jobs, some illustrations, some schoolbooks. I did the page layouts and the entire design for these books... Those crises literally swallowed the best and the most creative years of my life. The wars started in 1991-92, when I was forty, when I should’ve been creating as much as possible, but I got mired down in existential problems, hunting down jobs, designing packaging for coffee...

DM: How did you feel?

BK: Miserable.

A page from Gangs (script by J.-C. Bartoll, art by Kerac).
© Jungle

DM: Did you say it was Igor Kordey who got you back into comics?

BK: It was in 2010 at the comics festival in Rijeka... I saw Igor there, and one day over breakfast he asked me what’s up, what was I doing? I said: “Nothing, I gave up on it all!” And he said: “You can’t give up. You’re quitting? How old are you?!” He dressed me down mercilessly: “You did all those things, you’re so good at it, and now all of a sudden – no, nothing, never mind?!” I said, well okay, I did a couple of tryouts for the French, but then I got pissed with them, I don’t have the patience for that. So he told me: “You know what, as soon as you get back to Novi Sad call your agent, right away!” And as soon as I got back, I called my agent and I got lucky, I did Gangs, this utterly idiotic comic, but it was well paid.

DM: How did that make you feel?

BK: Horrible! That gig was pure drudgery, I felt really bad. Imagine drawing a scene like this <He points to an album> and then when the plot moves to Japan – you have to draw the whole of Tokyo! ... Here I snuck in myself, there’s Kobra and Cindy... You see this panel here? The writer sent me a photo of that entire hotel room, and it was all baroque, oriental, with like three million ornaments. But I went online and found a room in that same hotel that had a huge aquarium. And he couldn’t say a thing, because it was also a room in that hotel. It was all purely technical, uninteresting, cuts in all the wrong places, bland dialogue and a rushed ending, since he didn’t have space to tie everything up, because of all those cities I had to draw. That’s usually the problem with those French writers, they’re all failed screenwriters at heart, really annoyed that they had to stoop down to writing comics.

A page from Lignes de front (script by J.-P. Pecau, art by Kerac). © Delcourt

A page from Lignes de front (script by J.-P. Pecau,
art by Kerac). © Delcourt

DM: And what was it generally like, working for the French?

BK: The stuff I did with Jean-Pierre Pecau, Lignes de front, that suited me just fine. That was a nice adventure tale. The desert, the jungle, a Clint Eastwood’s lookalike, it was almost a western... I felt reborn.

DM: Did you prefer working for the French to your current work for Bonelli?

BK: Bonelli is better, by a mile. Simply put, in the time it takes me to do a single page for the French, I can do three pages for Bonelli. Though one page for Bonelli pays much less than one page for the French, but three pages for Bonelli pay better than a single page for the French.

DM: How did you get the Zagor gig?

BK: Well, that’s a much longer story... Were on you the stripovi.com message boards? Back when I was jobless, I put out the word to Zagor fans that my long-time inker, Branko Plavšić, and I will make a 100-page episode if the fans manage to collect 2000 euros, because we can’t really work for free. We had a sort of kickstarter going on, and I even sold comic book appearances: it cost ten euros to be a bandit in the story, a hundred to slap Zagor in the face, and so on. It was all pure fantasy, I put it out there because I knew it would never happen, and then – crap, it did! There really were a hundred rabid Zagor fans, and before you know it, they all reserved two or three copies each... Of course, I had no intention of doing this without consulting with Bonelli first. Back then it was already known that the editor of Zagor, Moreno Burattini will come to the comics festival in Kragujevac, so I planned on catching up with him there, to discuss it, which I did over lunch. The day before I sneakily handed him a couple of Cat Claw books, so he’d realize I wasn’t just some fanboy, but a serious artist that can handle certain things. He really liked the idea, said that there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with it, but that Sergio Bonelli, the owner, had the final say. It was August, Sergio was supposed to come back from his holiday in September, so that’s when we shall ask him. I said okay, no problem. We parted with a tacit approval. September comes, and Sergio was supposed to be back in the office around the tenth of the month. He didn’t, because he got ill. No problem, we’ll wait until he gets better. But Sergio never got better. He died. I didn’t insist on it any further, because that must’ve been the furthest thing on Moreno’s mind, you know how it is when a king dies... Then Davide Bonelli, Sergio's son, came to helm the publishing house, and later on I found out that Moreno did ask him about our project, and that Davide did approve it. But before I found that out, Branko died, too, and that made the whole project pointless. I didn’t want to do it without Branko. But, based on all those talks and those Cat Claw albums, when Moreno and I met during a festival in Makarska the following year, he asked me if I’d like to do an issue of Zagor. And that’s how we started collaborating. That was back in 2015.

Kerac pays homage to the favorite westerns of his childhood in this panel from Zagor. © Bonelli Comics.

DM: Is drawing a page from someone else’s script different from drawing a page of your own?

BK: Of course. For my comics, I start off a page by having no idea whatsoever what will be on it. I just go by the page before it and the feel of the overall story. I never had a written script, I’d simply draw whatever comes to mind and develop the story the way I felt it should. As for the comics I do professionally, according to someone else’s script, you can see an example here. <He shows a printed Zagor script, with thumbnailed page sketches.> When I get a script, I make myself some sort of a template, which I then further elaborate on paper.

DM: In Zagor, the script dictates the size of the panels. How did you lay out the page when you’d receive a script from the French?

BK: Well, there was no planning, because the editor gave me a directive that everything had to be like a movie screen, panoramic. Which means I had very few square panels, so there was no particular planning, pacing or anything. I'd just draw one panel which is, for example, two inches tall and nine inches wide, showing a clash of two armies with four thousand horsemen. And the next panel is, let’s say, a close-up on the hero’s eyes. Now imagine those two images, one atop the other. It was horrible. That worked for Sergio Leone, but here, in comics, it simply doesn’t.

DM: You mentioned you loved movies, but you never drew movies, you’d always drawn comics.

BK: Of course. I have a very clear division between the language of comics and the language of cinema. Now, there are a lot of places where they cross over, but film is still a living, moving thing, and cinematic storytelling in comics is redundant. Comics are a much faster medium than film, here you can say more with less. I mean, I never wanted to be like the Bonelli scriptwriters, to show some action shot-by-shot, from beginning to end. Our Tarzan stories were all done in sixteen pages. You can say quite a lot in that amount of space and I often think some of those 200-page Bonelli stories could be told in just sixteen.

A self-insert of Kerac, flanked by his two sons, in another panel from Zagor. © Bonelli Comics.

DM: There's a theatrical production of Cat Claw playing in Novi Sad at the moment. How does it feel when your creation lives on beyond you?

BK: Well, I must say I’m flattered.

A scene from the theatrical production of Cat Claw in Novi Sad. © Pozorište mladih, Novi Sad.

DM: And how did it feel when a bunch of Kerac clones started drawing comics, back in the 1980s?

Il Grande Blek, as written and drawn by Kerac.

BK: That I didn’t like too much. Well, I liked it as a sign of respect. But when some clone of mine never moves on from that, I don’t really like that. I mean, I’ve had periods where I drew like Hermann – well, tried to draw like Hermann, or Giraud, or Pepe Gonzáles – but I’d always build on it, so it would still be mine. I mean, all right, most of my clones overcame that little Bane Kerac within them, just like I overcame my own role models. That’s because I’m a huge opponent to any sort of authority, so I’d get incredibly annoyed when those professors at the Academy of Arts would try to make Mini-Mes out of their students, and they wouldn’t let you be a Mini-You.

DM: Who set your art as the character model on Il Grande Blek and Tarzan? Was that an editorial mandate?

BK: No, it was my own renown, built up by then, the accepted opinion that Bane Kerac is really good, and what he says, goes. No editor told Marinko Lebović that his Il Grande Blek must look like mine. He decided that for himself, because he liked my depiction of Blek more than the Italian one. Slavko Pejak also did that, at first. But the character model for Blek was created by Branko Plavšić, in the first two pilot episodes. Back there Blek looked like American superheroes, with gritted teeth and squinty eyes, the Flash Gordon template, just with longer hair. I actually made Branko’s Blek a bit more normal. For Tarzan I also made the character model that relied more on Russ Manning's art than on Hogarth’s... and the rest of the artists just followed my lead.

Tarzan, as conceived by Bane Kerac ...
© Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.

DM: Why did Plavšić switch to inking?

BK: One simple reason: he was a better inker. His pencils were a bit stiff, but when he had good material to ink, like with Balkan Express, then he was great.⁶

DM: Do you prefer his inks, or your own?

BK: Well, my own. Now I can freely say that I never liked most of the Tarzan episodes he inked, not because of the way he inked them, but because of this secret pact between Toza Tomić and Branko Plavšić. Toza told Plavšić that my Tarzan was too skinny, because I never imagined Tarzan as some six-foot-five giant. For example, I consider Christopher Lambert the best representation of Tarzan. Now that was a man who could swing from a vine, if you catch my drift... My Tarzan was like Manning’s, and then Tomić, in some drunken conversation, told Plavšić: “Bulk up Tarzan a bit!” So almost every Tarzan that Plavšić inked is this ridiculous caricature with bulging muscles.

DM: Why did you agree to work on Tarzan?

... and as inked by Branko Plavšić.
© Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.

BK: Because it was better than working on Blek. It was better paid and more fun. Then it turned out it wasn’t quite like that. On Blek I had freedom, I was working from my own script. I came to Tarzan to work on someone else’s scripts. I could manage that for the first two or three episodes, but afterwards... I drew the pilot episode that was sent to Spain for approval, and when they saw it, they greenlit the entire project. <He points to a volume of Tarzan reprints> Now this was my Tarzan. When you compare it to the first volume, you’ll notice that he’s more slender, leaner, completely different.

DM: Plavšić re-inked that entire story over your inks?

BK: He made copies, and then... Look at this tall, wiry man, Christopher Lambert, and then look at Branko’s Tarzan. It certainly was better inked than I could ever do it, but screw that.

DM: How did the rights holders react to your Tarzan? Did you get any feedback?

BK: Of course. I’ll repeat here what I wrote in the foreword to the collected edition, which is the way I heard it. Slavko Draginčić would disagree, he says it happened a bit differently, but he never said exactly how... At the Frankfurt Book Fair Toza Tomić met with the people from Atlantic publishing, regarding the publishing rights to Tarzan. During that conversation they mentioned how they weren’t at all pleased with the current Spanish production. The way Toza told it, he said, without even thinking: “Well, want us to do it in Yugoslavia?” He probably didn’t even expect an affirmative answer, but they replied: “Do a test episode, and we’ll see.” Then he contacted me, because I was – let me be immodest for a sec here – possibly the only one who could draw that test episode back then. We got a contract, a really good one, that worked in our favor, unlike the way it usually goes, so we started the production. In the beginning quite a lot of it was up to me, until they brought in other artists, until we organized it all a bit better. But it’s all right, the workload wasn’t too heavy: sixteen pages a month.

DM: Do you know where it was published, other than Yugoslavia?

BK: It was published in the Scandinavian countries, it was published in Denmark, Germany, Holland... We have some unofficial information that it was sold to some other markets, but they didn’t report it back to us, which was to be expected.

DM: How much were you preoccupied with Tarzan?

BK: Pretty much. But I had time to work on Kobra and Cat Claw too.

A page of Tarzan drawn by Kerac.
© Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.

DM: Are you pleased with your work on Tarzan?

BK:  <Sigh.> There are episodes where... not only am I not pleased, I’m ashamed I worked on them. Not because of my artwork, but because I even agreed to draw something like that. And I’m quite pleased with some of the others. I don’t know how to explain it to you. There are a couple of episodes that I wrote which I really enjoyed. If that guy wasn’t called “Tarzan”, it would just be a typical comic of mine, it had nothing to do with Tarzan, whatsoever. I did an episode which was a homage to Tim Tyler. I did it according to all the rules set by Lyman Young, and in it you had Tarzan partnering up with some cop. If I had put a shirt on Tarzan, nobody would recognize him as Tarzan. Then there’s that lovely episode “Starchild”, based on Dušan Vukojev’s idea. I just took his story and expounded upon it, I used the likeness of my older son there – I even killed Tarzan in it! I drew a cover depicting Tarzan being pinned to a tree by a spear, dead and gone. That was actually the scene with Miloš Vojnović from Baš Čelik comic, which Đorđe Lobačev drew a long time ago, and which really shocked and frustrated me back when I was little. I really liked that scene from Baš Čelik, so I used that episode of Tarzan to pay homage to Lobačev. Toza Tomić was horrified. Not with my drawing, it was more: “They’ll never approve this, man!” And so we cut and pasted something else for the cover, but I had to change the script as well, and kill Tarzan with an arrow. Then there was that episode, “The Tiger”, where Toza Obradović wrote a classical script, but I told him: “You know what? I’ll do this one without any dialogue.” So it’s one of the rare episodes of Tarzan without any text. And the “Star of Kalonga” was a huuuuge pleasure to do, all five parts of it. I got to draw Kobra and Cindy in it, and Tarzan was basically a supporting player. I really enjoyed that.

DM: I sense a leitmotif: you’re happiest when you work of your own accord, and when you can pay homage to the things you like.

BK: Precisely.

DM: Do you write comics just so you could draw what you want, or do you write so nobody else will write for you? I don’t know if this question makes sense, but...

BK: It makes perfect sense. That is mainly why I write. I even had a saying: “Better to draw my own nonsense, than someone else’s! If someone can write such a dumb script, then so can I!” I wrote very few scripts for others, therefore: yes, I write so I can draw.

A page from the unfinished Balkan Express (script by
Gordan Mihić,pencils by Bane Kerac,
inks by Branko Plavšić).

DM: Over the years, there was a number of projects you started, intended as a series but then abandoned because there was not enough time to do them or enough artists to join you. Any regrets?

BK: I was always sorry that there wasn’t anyone who could keep up with me, not only when it comes to drawing, or my tempo, but when it comes to my way of thinking. I paid a steep price because I wasn’t an argumentative guy, and I never insisted for things to go my way. I did a lot of weak stuff in comics that was requested by the editor, because I didn’t see much point in going against someone who outranked me. No matter how dumb he is, that guy will see his will through, so why would I fight a losing battle? I would rather draw something completely idiotic, than object to it.

DM: Why isn’t there room today for your own creator-owned series?

BK: Simply put: the economy. I can’t live off of my own comics. I would, for example, have to put in at least six months to finish the final episode of Cat Claw, and abandon everything else while doing it. And then what? First and foremost, if I left my Zagor gig to work on Cat Claw, I don’t know if they’d ever take me back. Therefore, the financial risk of a creator-owned comic is much greater than the pleasure. It’s quite simple.

DM: What about all your unfinished comics?

BK: Ehh... I would like nothing more than to draw them all still. If I was physically able, if I could clone myself, like Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, if I could make 3 or 4 other Kerac’s, so one can draw Cat Claw, one Lieutenant Tara, one Kobra... And I’d also do some other things I never really got around to.

Endnotes:

² In the original version of this interview Kerac points out Alexander’s Serbian parentage.

³ After this interview was finished, Bane went and updated the dialogues again. :)

⁴ Billy the Spit is Kerac’s gag series of western one-pagers, written by a variety of hands.

⁵ Ervin Rustemagić’s story was told in comic-book form in Fax from Sarajevo by Joe Kubert.

⁶ Balkan Express is an unfinished comics series, pencilled by Kerac and inked by Plavšić, adapting Gordan Mihić’s scripts for a TV-series.

⁰ The whole deal for Eternity publishing Cat Claw in the USA from 1990-1991 was organized via Rustemagić's Strip Art Features. As per Bane, the translator was Rida Attarashany.

CORRECTION: The captions for Gangs and Lignes de Front were switched and are correct as of 6/13/2023. Endnote 0 was added to answer a question in the GCD credits for the Eternity reprints in America.

IN FAVOR OF HAPPY ENDINGS: Yugoslavia and Serbia's Bane Kerac interviewed by Darko Macan, part 1 of 2

Bane Kerac photo by Davor Đurinić.

 by Darko Macan

Yugoslavia was a country in the Balkans created as a kingdom in the aftermath of WWI, rebuilt as a Socialist Federal Republic after the Communist-led victory in WWII, and dissolved in a civil war that raged throughout the first half of 1990's. The history of Yugoslav comics was equally tumultuous, although less bloody. After the first tentative steps in 1920s, comics gained a foothold from about 1935 onwards, mostly in the form of newspaper strips and, soon after, weekly newsprint magazines, none of which survived the war. During the first few post-war years the Communist government looked down on the comics as an infantile drug-like product imported from the West, and it was not until 1950 that the homegrown production, first in the form of comics for children, followed by adventure strips and a new slew of the weeklies, started again. The situation changed somewhat in the mid-1960s, when Yugoslavia opened more to the free trade with the Western countries, which soon led to the import of many Italian, British, French and American comic strips. The generation of Yugoslav authors brought up on this cornucopia started producing its own works for a number of monthly magazines about a decade later, and this “Golden Age of Yugoslav Comics“ – as christened by Bane Kerac in this interview – lasted for about a decade, until the state-led economy collapsed in mid-1980s, followed by the disintegration of the whole country soon thereafter.

A gallery of all the characters Bane Kerac worked on up until 1988.

Branislav “Bane” Kerac was born in 1952 in Novi Sad (in today’s Serbian province of Vojvodina) and became a professional comics artist in 1975, along with the childhood friend, and writer, Svetozar “Toza” Obradović. Kerac and Obradović created a number of short and long-lived series, their first success being Lieutenant Tara, a WWII-themed series, with Kobra, a serial about the adventures of a Yugoslav-born stuntman, following soon in Tara's footsteps. Their final joint creation was Cat Claw, a Spider-man influenced superheroine which became Kerac’s first international success (he ended writing the majority of its forty-plus episodes himself). On top of all the series he created or co-created, Bane Kerac was a powerhouse of the work-for-hire scene, setting the tone for the Yugoslav episodes of Italian hero Il Grande Blek, and becoming the head artist on the late 1980s Yugoslavia-based production of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan comics. The civil war halted most of his endeavors, so Bane found himself looking for work in the United States, where he spent the following few years working for Dark Horse (under the pen-name HM Baker), and then turning towards illustration and design to make ends meet. He returned to comics fifteen years later, working first for the French publishers, and finally finding a gainful employment drawing the Zagor series for the Italian publishing giant Bonelli.

The story of Bane Kerac – infected by comics just as they were becoming popular in Yugoslavia again, entering the profession at the most auspicious moment for a young artist, shaping the image of his country's comics for the next generation and then finding himself scrounging for work ever since – mirrors the history of comics in the Balkans during the past fifty years. The interview which follows discusses his path, dreams and influences, and was conducted by Darko Macan in February 2023 for a book collecting all of Kerac's Cat Claw work (published by Fibra in Zagreb, Croatia, in May of 2023). It's been edited for IJOCA and translated by Draško Roganović and the author.

IN FAVOR OF HAPPY ENDINGS

(An interview with Bane Kerac)

 

DM: When did you start reading comics?

BK: It’s the same old story, but a nice one, so it’s worth repeating. It was January of 1958, I was five and a half years old. My mom bought me the fifth issue of Kekec weekly at the newsstand, and since I couldn’t read it myself, but was gawking wide-eyed at the pictures, she’d read it to me. In fact, there’s a prelude to that story, because my mother was a huge cinephile, and would take me to the movies ever since I was a baby. Back then it wasn’t such a big deal to take babies to the cinema, because babies weren’t very spoiled and wouldn’t whine much. And even if I started crying, my mom would get out and that was that. Or she’d breastfeed me in the dark, so I’d calm down.

DM: So, you were weaned on movies along with your mother’s milk?

BK: Most likely. Anyway, I went to the movies with my mother until I was seven, eight or nine, and quite frequently, too, because my mom liked to check out all the new releases. She wasn’t at all picky when it came to genres, so I saw a bunch of westerns, too. But the fateful year was 1962, when Crtani romani comic first came out in pocket format. That’s where I saw those true masters: Arturo del Castillo, Alberto Breccia, Alberto Salinas and Jesus Blasco, who left a huge impression on me.

“Dead or Alive”, a story drawn by Kerac in a school notebook when he was thirteen (1965).

DM: How many kids read comics back then?

BK: All of them. Girls not so much, but it was practically our only entertainment. Comics were movies brought to paper.

DM: And when did television come into your life?

BK: It came when Toza Obradović’s father bought a television set for his family. Toza Obradović was my neighbor from the next street over, a bit older than me, and we went to the same school. He was two grades above me, but we bonded over comics and we would trade them. The first TV-shows I’ve watched were Jungle Jim with Johnny Weissmuller, and Dennis the Menace. That was around 1963-1964. I remember a dozen of us kids rushing to the door of Toza’s place. When his mom, auntie Draginja, would open them, she’d see that wild bunch, roll her eyes and say: “All right, get in!”

DM: What was his father’s line of work?

BK: His father was a military man, and a relatively well-off one, so Toza was able to keep up even with the more expensive weeklies that would put a much bigger strain on the budget of us working class kids. I would buy Kekec or borrow Politikin zabavnik, which I didn’t really care for, from my neighbor. In Zabavnik I’d read Flash Gordon, but the rest didn’t really interest me all that much.

DM: You weren’t interested in the other comics, or the articles?

BK: I didn’t care at all about the articles. I considered them a waste of time, when you could, like, dive right into an adventure instead. I also read the daily comic strip page in Dnevnik, which had Carol Day, Ben Bolt, Johnny Hazard and Scamp. I loved reading Carol Day when I was twelve or thirteen. It was like a TV-show, a serious comic, unlike Ben Bolt, which was just plain fun, or Johnny Hazard, which was even more fun.

DM: How do you gauge the levels of fun?

BK: It’s easier if we compare it to film: the movie Home from the Hill with Robert Mitchum, for example, was a serious film for that day and age, but some other western like, I don’t know, The Trap with Richard Widmark, that was just plain fun.

DM: So, you say you took Kekec and “gawked” at the pictures?

BK: Yes, because they were in color, so they brought me the same feeling as the cinema. The color films started here back in 1956. Up until then, I’d only seen comics in Politikin zabavnik and at my neighbors’, the Erdeljani brothers, who had a bunch of pre-war comics. But those were all black and white comics.

DM: You mentioned Crtani romani. What set it apart from other comics magazines?

BK: Those were complete stories. And, the most important thing for me in those 48 pages was the tempo. It would tell a lot of story in a relatively small space. Each issue of Crtani romani, if you filmed it shot by shot, would amount to an hour-and-a-half-long movie. That’s really fantastic. In Crtani romani you’d never have the main hero punching a bandit, and in the next panel have the bandit falling down and breaking a chair. No, that would be a single panel.

DM: In a way, such narration was anti-comics-like, just jumping from scene to scene?

BK: Yes, but those artists were so outstanding, they knew dynamics inside and out, so that you’d imagine three more scenes for every panel you've got. You didn’t need anyone to draw those sequences for you, because they would be a natural extension of the drawings.

DM: When did you start telling artists apart, and when did you start telling apart the good ones from the not-so-good ones?

BK: I could tell them apart right away, they immediately piqued my interest. On some comics I would notice the artist’s signature, and as for others, I had no clue what their names were. I discovered some of those only when Plavi vjesnik weekly started running a column about comic book heroes, which would have a pair of drawings by each and the name of the artist. That is where I found out about Del Castillo. For a long time I called Jesus Blasco “Blajlo”, because that’s how I deciphered his signature. I still have a sketchbook somewhere, where I copied signatures of some sixty artists that I knew and could tell apart. It was only in the mid-1970s, when the first series of Strip Art magazine edited by Ervin Rustemagić appeared, that they started regularly listing creators and publishing interviews with the famous artists. That’s where I saw that those artists meant something to someone, that they’re sort of, how do I put this... normal people? All the kids treated comic book artists like some supernatural beings, they couldn’t imagine someone sitting at a desk and drawing comics. The comics simply existed, there, in their hands. I’m actually glad that I didn’t immediately meet Žarko Beker or Jules, and figure out they were regular people, because I would lose some of that sense of wonder.

DM: Did Toza Obradović love comics as much as you?

BK: He greatly loved both films and comics, same as me. We loved the same heroes and the same movies, we had the same taste. For example, Toza agreed with me that Man of the West with Gary Cooper was a crappy movie because there were only three gunshots in the entire film, they just talked on and on in some cabin. Screw that kind of western! At the same time, we both loved films like Blood for a Silver Dollar with Giuliano Gemma, because it was all gunshots and fistfights.

DM: Did Toza ever draw?

BK: He tried drawing. He was a visual guy, he knew when to put in a close-up, when to put in a wide shot, he could instinctively put in “American shots” and other things that – back then – we didn’t even have the names for.

DM: Did Toza ever try to draw professionally?

BK: No, he just inked two episodes of Lieutenant Tara when we were on a tight deadline.

DM: And how did that turn out?

BK: Awful, but it worked. It wasn’t that bad. It was okay. But he never really tried to work on that. Very early on he opted to be a scriptwriter, realizing he wasn’t as good an artist as me. Let’s say you have two guitarists, and one is much less skilled – of course he’s the one who’ll switch to drums.

Kerac drumming for the GeroMetal band in 1994.

DM: Was that the case with you? Is that why you switched to playing drums in your band?

BK: No, that wasn’t the case with me. <Laughs.> I started on drums, because there was no way I could play the guitar.

DM: Because...?

BK: I simply didn’t have great coordination between my left and right hand.

DM: And you don’t need that to play drums?

BK: You do, but I realized that way too late. By then I’d already started drumming and... I’m actually a mediocre drummer. I never thought I was very good.

DM: You played drums before you started doing comics, then you played in the 90s, and now you’re playing again?

BK: My music career runs parallel to my comics career. When I was thirteen, in the 7^th grade, I started drawing complete comics in my school notebooks – a “special issue” of Crtani romani, I wrote it and everything. In 7^th grade Slavko Pejak transferred to my school from Bački Petrovac, he was also a comics-lover, but he loved rock’n’roll as well. Then came The Beatles, The Stones, Manfred Mann and that whole crowd, so together we’d listen to music and write and draw comics. We started a bunch of comics, because at that age you never finish what you started. One week you’re reading the Modesty Blaise strip, so you start on something crime-oriented with a female lead, but then Spartacus comes out, and you’re drawing Roman gladiators. You’re jumping from one topic to another, onto what interests you the most. And, of course, the first two pages you do are insanely detailed. Then your enthusiasm drops, so it turns into dumb goofing around and low humor, and then it never gets finished. But I’d finish those comics in my school notebooks. That was the difference.

DM: Why did comics and rock’n’roll grab so many people at the same time?

BK: Well, at least in our case, it was because of the simultaneous birth of modern comics and the arrival of rock’n’roll to Yugoslavia. Zenit magazine featured the first Daredevil comic I saw, which had a completely different approach to comics, so dynamic all of a sudden. Even though Crtani romani had more text compared to Flash Gordon or other syndicated comic strips, in Daredevil there was, unexpectedly, a scary amount of text, a completely different narrative philosophy. Finally, Zagor and Tex Willer arrived on our newsstands and at once we had the entire world covered, genre-wise. You had Panorama magazine with Oumpah-Pah, the Franco-Belgian comics like Luc Orient, and it’s like we’re standing in front of the record store. Because at the same time the record store is getting The Dave Clark Five, The Stones, The Beatles, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, Small Faces, and so on. So, suddenly, both of those worlds are opening up, and they both have a strong flavor of the West.

DM: When you were drawing in those notebooks, did you think you were making real comics, or were you just playing comics?

BK: Well, it was something in-between. That was my training for the real deal. Immediately after that, after Daredevil showed up, and when I found out, can’t remember how, that you have to do it with ink on Bristol paper, that’s when I started drawing seriously.

DM: But even before that you thought you could become an artist?

BK: As soon as I finished elementary school, I knew I’d draw for a living.

DM: Why?

BM: Because I knew how to do it.

DM: How did you realize you knew how to do it?

BK: Because the things I drew looked a lot like the stuff that got published. So, just through pure comparison. I never imagined myself as some sort of a grand artist. I would simply draw something, and it was close enough. I could copy, let’s say, a Prince Valiant drawing without too many mistakes, unlike my peers.

DM: How much is it a necessity, and how much is it a mistake to learn drawing comics by looking at other comics?

BK: You know what, this might come off as a bit immodest, but even the “real” artists learned their craft by copying and assisting the great painters. That’s got nothing to do with academic studies, attending lectures and such.

DM: Would you copy the art by putting it in front of you, or would you look at it and then later draw from memory?

BK: No, no, I’d copy it directly. But some things just stick in your mind... Toza and I had an interesting system. Back in my yard, in Sarajevska street, we had a huge apricot tree: deep shade, sunshine during summer holidays, and there was this wooden table with two benches. There we’d bring a bunch of Crtani romani issues, a stack of papers and sharpened pencils. Then Toza would start counting in his head, I’d say: “Stop!”, and it would be, for example, number 31. So we’d take out that issue, he’d start counting in his mind again, I’d say: “Stop!”, and it would turn out to be number 24. That would be issue 31, page 24. Then he’d count again, but only up to five, because back then there wouldn’t be more than five panels per page. One-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five, and then it would be, let’s say, the third panel. Third panel on page twenty-four in issue 31, and then your goal is to draw it.

DM: How old were you?

BK: Around ten, eleven, twelve. But, you know why we did all that? We would copy comics even before that, but we’d only pick the panels we liked, and so we drew, say, Eddy Shaftoe shooting in a semi-crouch about a hundred times, and all the other panels not even once. So I said: not on my watch, now we’re gonna take this seriously!

DM: You realized that drawing comics includes drawing even the things you don’t feel like drawing?

BK: I realized very early on that drawing is a grind. When you get some incredibly uninteresting image, like a horseman riding into town, and you have to draw a bunch of buildings and windows – ouch! But discipline is discipline, and that’s how I learned it. Toza didn’t have much discipline, that’s one thing he lacked.

DM: Some of your earlier comics were cartoonish. When, or rather, how did you make up your mind between the cartoonish and realistic style?

BK: I didn’t make up my mind at all, I drew how it came to me. If I read Marijac, then immediately after I’d sit and do stylized drawings. If Panorama published Oumpah-Pah, I’d draw cartoonish Indians, but if they published Luc Orient, I’d draw spaceships. I would literally sit down at my table the moment I’d come back from the cinema, and try to draw the things I’d just seen.

A Lieutenant Tara drawing from 1983. 

DM: Did you opt for realism, when deciding to do comics professionally and submitting Lieutenant Tara, because of its commercial viability?

BK: Yes, and because it tied well with the WWII theme of comics about the Partizans (Yugoslav resistance fighters in WWII). Toza and I actually wanted to do something like Lt. Blueberry, because of our fascination with Giraud. But we couldn’t go to Dnevnik and offer them a western, because they were already publishing things like that.

DM: That was back in 1975? How old were you?

BK: I was twenty-three.

DM: How did you two decide to set off into professional waters?

BK: We ran into each other one time, accidentally, after we’ve been apart for seven or eight years. “What are you doing now?” “Well, I draw a bit.” “Well, I write a bit...” Toza was just starting out in sports journalism and he had a friend on Dnevnik’s staff, who told us: “Okay, there is room for up-and-coming creators, no problem, just make a couple of pages and we’ll show them to the editors, see if they accept them.” They did, and so Lieutenant Tara started in Zlatni kliker magazine #10.

DM: What was the length of those episodes?

BK: Ten, twelve, sixteen, some even eight pages, depending on how much we could manage that month. Later on we realized we were severely underpaid compared to some other people... I asked for a higher page rate, Dnevnik wouldn’t give it to us, so Toza and I packed our bags and went to YU strip magazine. We’d realized there is room there for us, because they were publishing comics exclusively by Yugoslav authors. We got lucky and got a meeting with an editor who didn’t know much about comics. I've shown him a stack of Lieutenant Tara pages, about forty of them, to check out, and he looked at the first page very carefully, he was a bit faster with the second, the third one he just skimmed...

DM: A true editor!

BK: ...and by the fourth one he said: “I can see you are real pros!” and handed the pages back to us. And for us it was a huge ego boost, to hear that from an editor of a comics magazine. We didn’t have a clue that he didn’t have a clue. So we were talking to him, overjoyed, and he says to us: “Okay, make us something!” “Well, what should we make?” “I don’t know, something!” He didn’t really know either.  Toza and I had already talked about Kobra, how we would make a real home-grown comic with a Yugoslav hero, so we told the editor: “Here, we have this idea about Yugoslav stuntman who is travelling the world and getting into trouble.” And he told us: “Great, do it!” So we went home, made the first episode, gave it to him, and he said: “Excellent, go talk to so-and-so to get paid.” And suddenly we felt like world-class stars.

DM: Who decided episodes of Kobra should be 20 pages long?

BK: No one said they should be twenty pages long. That was just sort of my monthly rhythm. Drawing 20 Giraud-like pages a month... I was actually an idiot. Later on, we figured out that Brana Nikolić was getting more money for his marker doodles that lacked any effort – albeit not talent – than I got for Kobra. And that’s what led to us going over to Forum, yet another publisher.

DM: I notice that the motive for moving on is always the same. Did YU strip ever interfere with the contents?

BK: Well, no. Not in any real censorship sense. Our first quasi-censorship – when I first realized that the editor’s mindset was “let’s not rock the boat, so something doesn't happen”, even though “something” wasn’t clearly defined – came about when Toza in Tara wrote in a character called “Curly”. I promptly drew him as the bald Telly Savalas. Unfortunately, I drew him too well, and he really looked like Savalas, so the editor said: “Better put some hair on him so Telly Savalas doesn’t sue us!”

DM: Did you like WWII movies, or did you just picked the Partizan theme for Tara to get greenlit easier?

BK: Well, there was no particular fondness for the genre. We considered Yugoslav WWII movies like Battle of Sutjeska and Battle of Neretva as some sort of spaghetti western. But back then they made one very serious, even good film, a true Partizan western, that really moved us. It was called Maiden Bridge. It told a story of a prisoner trade-off on Maiden Bridge, so you had Partizans, three or four of them, transporting some German prisoners, and it was like a confined space drama. One Partizan had everyone in his life murdered by the Germans, so he wanted a revenge, then you had a German good guy, who’s an aristocrat and doesn’t condone Nazism... Maiden Bridge might have even directly inspired us to make a Partizan western.

DM: If I may ask a political question, what were your feelings towards Yugoslavia?

BK: Well, like all kids born in Yugoslavia, we never felt any pressure or oppression. No tyranny, no partocracy, nothing like that.

A page from Lieutenant Tara (script by Toza Obradović).

DM: You never considered Partizan movies as some sort of ideological indoctrination?

BK: No, I mostly considered them bad movies. It was always the same: these guys shoot and kill hundreds of Germans. It was the logic of westerns – a big deal! Tara wasn’t done because we were ordered to, we didn’t have to describe certain events, or even stick to history all that much. It was more like, how do I put this... American westerns from the 1950s weren’t even cowboy films, they were dramas, theatrical plays masquerading in cowboy clothes. You couldn’t see them rounding up cattle, or what have you. Gary Cooper was always neat and clean, he’d get a little bit dirty only if he got into some barn fistfight. But then, in 1964, there came A Fistful of Dollars, as well as our teenage fascination with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, so it was only natural that Lieutenant Tara got the face of Clint Eastwood.

DM: Where did your desire for humor in something serious come from? I don’t know if you ever worked on anything that was completely serious.

BK: Well, I did, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Even in that perfectly serious work there was always some goofing around I had to put in.

DM: Or some reference.

BK: Yes. I quite like references and homages. I don’t shy away from that. I never hid what inspired me. Here’s a curio: a real example of plagiarism that I did in my youth was in the early episodes of Lieutenant Tara. There was a scene where a German Shepherd dog jumps on some of our guys, but – how do you draw a German Shepherd? And so I directly copied Blasco’s German Shepherd from The Steel Claw. Nobody noticed, but I was ashamed of it.

DM: And so you decided to never again copy German Shepherds from Blasco?

BK: Among other things, but even when I copy some scene, I don’t totally copy it. And when I do copy it totally, you can plainly see it’s an homage and it’s not a secret. For example, when I redrew a Prince Valiant scene for Tarzan, it’s so obviously the scene when Valiant stands in front of King Sligon, you just know it. You can’t say “He copied it from Prince Valiant”, when it’s clear that it was copied for a purpose, and not because I wanted to get off easy.

DM: How important to you is this conversation with comics that came before you? Or do you simply do it for your own entertainment?

BK: Well, no, you see, of course I don’t do it just for me. It’s a kind of communication with the reader. The heavy metal fan in me is looking for another heavy metal fan, the reader. And so, the more of those heavy metal fans who like my comics gather around them, the happier I am. I have a bunch of Judas Priests mentions, references like that, with the occasional Grand Funk Railroad. Or these things I scribble down on my originals. <Holds up almost an entire diary entry written on the margins of a Zagor page.> That’s because I’m frustrated that I can’t put them in the comic. Although I snuck some even in Zagor: there’s a John Lord saloon, Hotel Morris...

The very first page of Kobra (1979), (script by Toza Obradović).

DM: You said you started thinking about Kobra as a Yugoslav character. Why did you start another comic series alongside Tara?

BK: So we’d have more work. I could do Tara in my sleep.

DM: What was the thinking behind Kobra’s creation?

BK: We saw that YU strip was something completely different than Zlatni kliker, because it was open to all genres. So, why not try that out?

DM: Give me some context regarding the creation of YU strip.

BK: First you had Dečje novine, a weekly magazine published in Gornji Milanovac and geared towards kids, and in there you had the comic Mirko i Slavko – a story about two boys who fought against Germans in WWII – initially as a weekly half-pager. Then, because it became really popular, and the magazine got a lot of letters, with every other letter asking for more Mirko i Slavko, Dečje novine decided to start publishing a separate magazine with only comics in it.

DM: And that’s how their comics publishing came to be?

BK: Yes, with the Nikad robom (Unconquered) series. Mirko i Slavko were in the first issue, the second had Radivoj Bogičević's comics about WWI, then Kokan...

DM: The concept was “the heroic battles of our people throughout history”?

BK: Yes, and every Yugoslav federal republic was represented: Radivoj Bogičević, Nikola Mitrović-Kokan and Žika Atanacković did the Serbian history, Ivica Bednjanec was tasked with Croatian history, Leo Korelc represented Slovenes, Ljubomir Filipovski Macedonians, and Ahmet Muminović Bosnians. Soon after, Dečje novine launched Eks almanah, a magazine featuring foreign comics, and then YU strip as a special edition dedicated to Yugoslav production, because all of a sudden a large number of authors appeared who weren’t the right fit for Nikad robom.

A later page from Kobra, (script by Toza Obradović).

DM: So, back to Kobra: what was the inspiration?

BK: Bernard Prince by Hermann and Greg. They even looked alike. Bernard Prince travels the world, he has his boat, and gets into adventures. So, we took the concept of a guy who travels around and gets into trouble, but we didn’t want him to be a sailor, so as not to be a direct copy. Now, our main idea was that it had to be someone from these parts.

DM: Was it a personal desire, or did you think it would be beneficial market-wise?

BK: It was because we wanted to make a proper Yugoslav comic. And if you could have a Frenchman travelling around the world and having adventures, then you could have an our guy, too. That wasn’t a problem. A really big problem was the name of our hero. You know, a series called Stanko Pribivalić, or something like that, isn’t really all that. He should have a real name, we named him “Slobodan Marković” right away, and for a reason, but you can’t name a comic like that and expect it to sell!

DM: And what was that reason for the name?

BK: He was Lieutenant Tara’s son. Tara’s name was Slobodan Mišović, and he had a son with the nurse Višnja Trandafilović, who he fell in love with during the Lieutenant Tara series. At the end of the war they transferred to OZNA (Yugoslav secret service), and ultimately got killed while chasing some Chetnik rebels around our mountains. But they managed to kill a couple of the main Chetniks, so Captain Marković, who was Tara’s commanding officer during the war, took in their son, born around that time, in order to protect him from any blood vendetta. He changed the kid’s surname to his own to cover his tracks. Shortly after, he got a job as a consul or an attaché in Hong Kong, and that’s where little Marković had his first contact with martial arts. That was the basis for a tale we were planning to make one day, as an “origin story”.

DM: I think it sounds better as is, shrouded in mystery.

BK: Yeah. So, that’s the story. But, a comic titled “Slobodan Marković”? Nah. So, what are we going to do? Then Toza says: “Well, if he’s a karate master who’s as fast as a cobra, why not simply call him Kobra?“

DM: So, it’s just a coincidence you have “K” for Kerac and “Obra” for Obradović?

BK: Wow, that’s a real eye-opener... It absolutely never crossed my mind, let alone Toza’s. That’s a really lovely coincidence.

DM: Was Dečje novine pleased with Kobra?

BK: Dečje novine was thrilled with Kobra. I’d deliver them an episode per month. Okay, that didn’t last too long, I delivered four episodes, then it became sparser. The more I improved as an artist, the harder it became. I would literally send some episodes to them the evening before the print deadline. For some episodes I even asked Sibin Slavković to assist me. I’d literally go to Sibin’s on a Saturday, and with his help finish an episode of Kobra, then on Monday it would go straight to the printers, to the repro-camera. Whew! It was a crazy tempo, but thanks to that tempo... I always said that I didn’t stand out from my generation so much when it came to talent – there were better artists than I – but I made my mark because I was everywhere. You couldn’t open your fridge without a Bane Kerac comic popping out at you.

DM: Was that an intentional strategy?

BK: No, I just loved drawing. So, right after elementary school I knew I’d draw comics for a living. But it was important to finish some schooling back in those days, and to find a steady job. Drawing comics didn’t look like a valid profession to me, nor to my parents. And since there was a dental technician in our neighborhood who owned his house and lived quite comfortably, I decided to enroll in dental school. My intent was to work mornings as a dental technician, so that I could peacefully draw in the afternoon. Which was all fine and dandy, but once I graduated my senior year, so did 90 other people. At that moment there was some 400 dental technicians waiting for a job at the national employment agency. So, what else could I do? I went to college, to become a dentist. There, at the end of my freshman year, I aced anatomy – it interested me, because of my drawing – but I failed chemistry. Though I didn’t waste a year. My future best man, Slavko Pejak, enrolled in Art school for Teachers. Back then they had to draw there almost as much as at the Academy of Fine Arts, so I’d go to classes with him. I would literally pretend to be a student, because the professors and students over there had no idea who was enrolled and who wasn’t... That was quite useful, there I came in touch with art history, materials technology, things like that. I didn’t care one bit about how many eggs you needed to make tempera paint, but I picked up some knowledge, like the golden ratio, perspective and such.

Kobra reappears in a Tarzan episode drawn by Kerac.

DM: For YU strip you didn’t stop at Kobra. There were shorter, experimental stories. Sometimes it seemed to me like you wanted to try out all genres and all formats?

BK: I did!

DM: Why?

BK: Because I was curious. Well, some of those things came about purely out of spite. Back then there was this clique of Belgrade critics who were really championing Novi Kvadrat art group,¹ and were advocating for pure art approach in comics. Us commercial artists, we didn’t separate comics that way. We realized straight away that Novi Kvadrat drew heavily on Metal Hurlant. Those were all okay comics, they weren’t direct copies, but they copied that mindset.

DM: Well, you copied Crtani romani.

BK: I did. Therefore, I didn’t consider it a crime, though I did think it was a crap move that those critics were bashing me, while praising them. On the other hand, they forgot one really harsh truth: when an alternative artist breaks through, he becomes a commercial one. Igor Kordey, one of the Novi Kvadrat group, is a stellar example of that.

DM: How fast did you work on Kobra?

BK: A page a day. I’d sit down in the morning, pick up the script, read it, lay out the page, pencil it in, and in the afternoon I’d do the inks, up until the evening.

A self-portrait by Bane Kerac from 2013.

DM: How did you collaborate with Toza on Kobra and Tara? Would you get the full script, read it, and then draw it, or would you change things around?

BK: Toza wrote good synopses, even detailed outlines for twenty-page comics. He had a really good sense of rhythm, he put cuts in all the right places, he had a real knack for that. But he had a bit more difficulty with the dialogue. It would be good enough for your average reader, but it was so sterile, so stereotypical, devoid of all humor or literary flair, of all originality. It was literally as if he took lines from a million previous comics, wrote them down, and would just regurgitate them. Twenty times he’d have the bad guy charge the hero with “Now you’ll pay!” And the hero would always reply: “Oh, really? We’ll see about that!” And I was horrified by that.

DM: But he was good enough to work as a scriptwriter?

BK: He was. And he had ideas. The first two or three episodes of Kobra were completely written by him. Then I started to ignore his breakdowns. I’d just, you know, take the gist of a page, and lay it out the way I wanted. I’d subtract or add in panels and, so he wouldn’t get confused when finalizing the dialogue, I’d put in my own dialogue. At first he’d change them back to his own words, but as time went by he’d leave more and more of my dialogues in. During the final Kobras that I did with Toza, I was pretty much doing everything myself, him providing just a bare-bones synopsis. By then he’d become pretty much indifferent to it all, drained by the production tempo that makes you constantly come up with new ideas. He’d already got a job in the TV archives, and he worked as a sports writer for various magazines. He also kept up with basketball, he was a basketball coach, and he actively played the sport.

Endnotes:

¹ Novi kvadrat group was active in Zagreb from 1976-1979. Its most prominent members were Mirko Ilić and Igor Kordey.

 continued in part two