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.