Book Review: Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Characters by Mark Hibbett

 reviewed by Chris York

Mark Hibbett. Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. $110 (Hardcover). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-45173-7

Mark Hibbett’s book is the most recent installment of the Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels series edited by Roger Sabin. The series has a broad, international focus, with a mission to explore “all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, […] through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication,” (ii) and Hibbett’s empirical study delivers on that mission.

Hibbett’s purpose, as he states in his introduction, is “to define a straightforward methodology for empirically analyzing transmedia characters” (1). By identifying and collecting character data in a number of categories from a corpus of texts, researchers should be able to, among other things, analyze character development over time, recognize shifts across media, and empirically identify the core signifiers of a character.

As such, the largest section of the study is the methodology which addresses both the design and implementation of his model for transmedia characters. Though Doctor Doom features in the title of the book, he is simply the primary case study Hibbett uses to illustrate the usefulness of the tool; a thorough analysis of the character is secondary to the explication of the model.

Data-driven analysis is trending within Comics Studies and Hibbett’s intention is to contribute to “database-led methods of corpus analysis” is two ways. First, he is trying to develop a system of identifying and analyzing character-specific signifiers that is adaptable across Comics Studies, and not merely applicable to a single character or storyworld (i.e. a fictional universe in which a story exists, such as the Marvel Universe or Marvel Cinematic Universe). Second, and perhaps more challenging, he is trying to develop a system that is effective for collecting data that is not text specific and, therefore, can draw data effectively for characters and story worlds that exist across different media.

To these ends, the model for transmedia characters records thirteen different kinds of information related to a character, each of which falls into one of four categories: character, behavior, storyworld, and authorship. Character components include appearance, names and titles, physical actions, and dialogue. Behavioral components include perceived behavior, personality traits, and motivations. Storyworld components that were recorded consist of locations, other characters, objects, and previous events. Finally, he identifies references to both textual authors and market authors within the texts.

In creating these components and categories, the author draws from previous attempts to identify essential signifiers for characters and storyworlds. He cites as foundational to his own model the work of Matthew Freeman, Marie Laurie Ryan, Paolo Bertetti, and Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio. In combining elements from all of them, Hibbett believes he has a model that is both practical and comprehensive.

Hibbett is thoughtful in his assignations and provides explanations for how and why he selected the thirteen dimensions for his model. He describes at length, for example, his thought process in constructing his Behavior category. Simply documenting descriptions of a character’s behavior based on language within the text (whether that language comes from the narrator, the featured character, or other characters) is, in his estimation, both inadequate and misleading. Yet, he continues, even a simple description of character behavior by the researcher would risk being neither empirical nor reproducible. He settled, finally, on three components within the Behavior category. “Perceived behavior” and “motivation” rely on language drawn directly from the text. However, the data for “personality traits” is gathered using the 10 Item Short Version of the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI). The three, in combination, provide a meaningful and objective measurement of character behavior.

The case study he uses to test his model is Marvel’s Doctor Doom from 1961-1987. Hibbett selects Doctor Doom for several reasons; since he is generally not the titular character and appeared in a variety of titles, he “would function as a way of sampling the different Marvel storyworlds over time” (54). Furthermore, since Doctor Doom rarely had his own series, Hibbett argues, there was no specific author or authors who ‘owned’ him, which could provide interesting information regarding what creators saw as the essential signifiers for the character.

Hibbett’s model is largely successful, and the case study of Doctor Doom makes it clear how useful of a tool it can be.  He notes that a primary value of this kind of empirical research is providing some quantitative evidence for some of the conclusions that comics scholars tend to intuit. For instance, scholars of the Marvel Universe would generally conclude that Doctor Doom’s character is, to a large degree, consistent over time; Hibbett’s model provides the data to support that assumption in a number of ways.

However, the model can also reveal inconsistencies and changes in character development. For example, Hibbett observes that Doctor Doom’s use of derogatory exclamations like “Dolt!” and “Clod!” were very common in early representations of the character and a feature that many of the people he surveyed identified as central to Doom’s character. However, Hibbett’s data shows that this kind of language diminished over the decades. He speculates; “[i]t could be that such words were used more often in the earlier period because writers then tended to use dialogue as a way to define character more than those in later periods, where other methods such as appearance and actions became more important. It could also indicate a change in writing style…“ (130). While this is an interesting line of inquiry and one worthy of being pursued, Hibbett does not elaborate further. His purpose is not to argue why certain elements of Doom’s character change or do not change. Rather, the goal of this project is to illustrate the effectiveness of his model by identifying these shifts in character.

There are some shortcomings to his case study, which he readily recognizes. One problem is related to the sample size. Because he was working independently and without funding for the project, he catalogued neither the entirety of Doctor Doom’s appearances during this era, nor did he manage a statistically significant sample size. Rather, he looked only at a “representative” sample of texts, chosen randomly from Doctor Doom’s appearances during the Silver and Bronze ages. These problems of time and cost are likely to persist for anyone wanting to use Hibbett’s model. Furthermore, Doctor Doom’s appearances in media other than comic books are very limited during this era, and so the efficacy of this tool across media is unclear.

In an attempt to illustrate the adaptability of the model, Hibbett includes a chapter in which he uses his character model to compare British and American versions of Denis the Menace. The inclusion of this chapter is my only real criticism of the book. The chapter itself is interesting but would have worked better as a separate document. Here, it seems extraneous, given the almost exclusive attention to Doctor Doom throughout the rest of the book. Hibbett, in fact, pays almost no attention to this chapter in either his discussion or conclusion.

That criticism aside, Hibbett has done some very good work. He also shares his data readily. Through appendices he provides both the corpus he used for Doctor Doom and the survey he used for generating his signifier set. Furthermore, he provides full digital access to the complete data for the Doctor Doom study. I very much recommend this book. The model is a useful analytical tool and Hibbett’s thorough explanation of his process will be invaluable for anyone considering data-driven analysis.

A Hulkologist’s Lament - Book Review of The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon.

reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

 Johnson, Rich. The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon. Universe, 2022. https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780789341242/

 A Hulkologist’s Lament

The cover of The Incredible Hulk number 1 (May, 1962) by Stan Lee/Jack Kirby famously puts forth the question: “Is he man or monster or … is he both?”

Rich Johnson’s slapdash ramshackle of a book The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon (2022) prompts a different query: “Is it a cynical marketing ploy, a poorly-written/edited rush job … or is it both?”

Johnson is a former DC Comics VP, writer for The Beat and founder of the manga imprint Yen Press. Unfortunately, those industry insider credentials don’t translate into a very informative, incisive or fresh take on the Hulk. The heavy, 225-page tome (which retails at $50) is certainly handsome. It has good production values, quality paper, crisp images and vibrant colors for its copious reproductions of comics pages, panels and covers. The endpapers function as Hulk wallpaper in a color scheme suggestive of our hero’s pants. Cute. But again, good presentation only gets you so far.

The opening pages greet you with full page art by Frank Cho (Red Hulk), Tim Sale (Gray Hulk) and Bill Sienkiewicz (old-fashioned green Hulk). It turns out that these choices signal what to expect in the book as a whole: an almost complete neglect of ¾ of the Hulk’s actual history and especially of the artists most associated with the foundational phases of the character — Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Marie Severin, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buscema, Todd McFarlane, Dale Keown — in favor of very recent (like, mostly 21^st-century) creators. With all due respect, that’s really skewed.

How skewed? Well, let’s see: Kirby gets six pages, mostly from the origin story. Ditko gets one. Meanwhile, Al Ewing’s horror-fied run on the character, The Immortal Hulk (mostly with artist Joe Bennett, from 2018 to 2021), clocks in at 31 pages.

So, yeah, skewed to the point of doing a disservice to both the earlier creators and the character. It’s particularly galling, since a full appreciation of Ewing’s nostalgia-heavy run demands a familiarity with the long sweep of Hulk history, i.e. the works of said Silver and Bronze-age creators (including writers Len Wein, Bill Mantlo and Peter David).

I realize it’s pointless to argue with this book’s selections of what to cover (most likely Johnson had to bend to the will of his bottom-line Marvel corporate overlords anyway), but it must be said: the Hulk has over 60 years of continuity, and while some of those thousands of stories resonate more than others, it’s hard to credit a history that leaves out or gives exceedingly short shrift to the Hulk as a founding member of the Avengers and as a founding member of the Defenders. We don’t even see a single panel from those stories.

But that’s just for starters. There’s no serious attention paid to the crucial matter of the Hulk’s psychological divide and how it originated (under Mantlo and David in the 1970s/80s) and how it relates to Banner’s abuse as a child by his father. There’s also virtually nothing on the character’s gray “Joe Fixit” persona, a fruitful era under David and (at first) Jeff Purves. But what the hey, at least we do get several pages devoted to Hulk & Thing: Hard Knocks (2004), a less distinguished and pretty much forgotten effort by writer Bruce Jones and artist Jae Lee.

Oh well, at least Johnson’s writing is penetrating, edifying and fresh. Just kidding, it’s a hack job! It’s all plot synopses, platitudes like “Being a superhero is never easy” and pat takes such as “Maybe the reason the Hulk has been so popular for so long is that he reminds us of the strength we all have inside us.” Actually, I think something like the opposite is true: the Hulk as conceived represented the monster inside all of us, threatening to burst out. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were primary influences. Lee/Kirby’s genius lay in how (like Shelley) they humanized the monster, evoking sympathy, even compassion.

That feels like another big missed opportunity: if only Johnson had interviewed some of the creators and editors involved, or heck, even if he’d just quoted from Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics, we might have had some genuine insights into the Jade Giant, what makes him tick.

Instead, we get the most cursory factoids from Hulk’s early stories, like he was originally gray and changed to green with the second issue, or that at first Bruce Banner would undergo his transformations only when night fell, sort of like a werewolf. “Can’t we all relate to the struggle for control?” Johnson muses.

More disappointment: the book treats things like the character’s catch-phrase “Hulk smash!” as givens, in place of illuminating the reader as to how the phrase emerged, when it was first uttered. Banner’s “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” also gets a shout-out — but why not then tell the reader that it came not from the comics but from the 1970s TV show with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno? At times this book seems afraid to hit the reader with that sort of multi-media complexity. It doesn’t shy from talking about the movies, though. But again, in a weirdly selective way: no mention at all of Ang Lee’s flawed but interesting 2003 film, with Eric Bana. If all you had was this book to go on, you’d think the first cinematic Hulk was Ed Norton in 2008.

Yes, yes, I know, they didn’t make this for Hulkologists, but for a mainstream public unfamiliar with the history of the character. But then why leave out so much of that history and lean into those aspects of the Jade Giant with which mainstream readers (presumably those who’ve only watched the movies/TV shows) are already familiar? Why not challenge their view of the Hulk a bit? Johnson takes the opposite tack: devoting short chapters which synopsize the Hulk storylines which most resemble the movies, mostly from recent action-heavy comics which aesthetically resemble movies: World War Hulk, Totally Awesome Hulk, Future Imperfect, Red Hulk, Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, Indestructible Hulk, the aforementioned Immortal Hulk.

Jade Jaws is so much richer than that. Like, decades richer.

One other disconcerting facet of The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon deserves mention. This book is pretty but sloppy. It arranges material out of chronological order for no good reason. We are introduced to John Byrne’s obnoxious fourth-wall-breaking Sensational She-Hulk long before the original version of that character by Lee and John Buscema. The only justification I can think of is that Byrne’s version is the more famous, and the one that became a Marvel TV show about the time of the book’s release.

In discussing the love of Hulk’s life, Jarella (Betty Ross is Banner’s), we see covers and panels from issues that present the high points: Hulk’s journey to her microscopic home world, K’ai, the profound grief our hero experiences after she’s killed, his eventual return of her body to her people. But the text (more plot synopsis) doesn’t line up with the illustrations. The text in fact doesn’t make it past the first part of the storyline; it discusses neither the death of Jarella in #205 (November, 1976), nor the return of her body in #248 (June, 1980) — as if Johnson simply ran out of room, or some editor butchered his chapter to free up space for more pictures.

When I say sloppy, I mean sloppy.

They twice (on 29 and 105) rerun the same page of our heroine and the Toad Men from Sensational She-Hulk #2 (June, 1989), itself a parody of Hulk #2 (July, 1962). Not that they tell you that.

Johnson’s text ends suddenly on 219 in the middle of a discussion/plot synopsis of the 2007 World War Hulk storyline by Greg Pak and John Romita, Jr. It stops cold. The book’s last words are “… will he be able to have the control to stand down and end the war?” No clumsy conclusion, no silly outro or quippy “Go out and smash, folks!” Nothing. Again, you get the feeling that they met their quota and just said, “Okay, cut it here.”

Reader, they couldn’t even get the name of the book straight. The cover, with a portrait of Jade Jaws by Adi Granov, gives Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon, but the title page throws in the article and adjective.

Things like that show you the book was poorly edited and hastily put together by a right hand that didn’t know what the left hand was doing — in short by folks who don’t seem to know or care much about the subject.

Do I have anything nice to say besides the production values? Well, after mostly ignoring the creators of all these stories, the book does provide credits for them at the very end. And here and there, you get some worthwhile discussion of how the comics inspired/influenced the TVs/movies. It’s thin gruel, however.

In sum: I was expecting little, and that’s just what I got.

 

8/11/2024: updated with copy edits at the request of the author.

Book Review: Cooking with Deadpool

reviewed by 

Lizzy Walker

Wichita State University Libraries

Marc Sumerak, Elena P. Craig, and Ted Thomas. Cooking with Deadpool. San Rafael, California: Insight Editions, 2021. 143 pages, $29.99 978-1683838449 https://insighteditions.com/products/marvel-comics-cooking-with-deadpool

Fandom cookbooks, from comics to movies to video games, have become popular items. Cooking with Deadpool is a great addition to the genre. The book, totaling 63 recipes, contains six sections: Small Bites for Big Mouths; Side Jobs; Maximum Efforts; What the People Really Want; Waking Up with Wade; and Sweetest Things. X-Men’s Cable even has a few recipes in here. Each recipe includes an introduction by Deadpool, which are highly entertaining, as well as provide some history about the Marvel universe, or the dish itself. Other information included with the recipes are serving totals, the occasional helpful tip, and detailed instructions. While Deadpool helps the reader out with handy tips within some recipes, there are more in-depth explanations in Just the Tips, such as folding the perfect chimichanga before popping it into frying oil, making an accurate knife selection for the job, and spatchcocking a chicken. Provided at the end of the cookbook is a menu section that helps the reader combine different recipes to host the perfect meal. Deadpool, also known as Wade Winston Wilson, is the Merc with a Mouth, and Sumerak has a solid grasp on how to write the character, even in a cookbook. Along with the recipes and tips, Deadpool delivers snarky one-liners and casual poses.

As I read through the recipes, something that was refreshing is that all of the ingredients can be found at your local or big box grocery store. This makes the ingredients, and the meals, quite accessible. From creating the shopping list, to preparation and cooking, to serving, everything in here is understandable for the beginning chef and gourmand alike.

The design of the hardcover cookbook is fantastic. It can stand up to kitchen use well. The spine allows for the book to lay flat on a counter or other flat surface. The glossy pages are also easy to clean if anything happens to drip onto them in the preparation of the delicious recipes.

A Review of Selected Recipes (photos by Lizzy Walker)

Ya Basic Chimi: This one was easy to prep, except for folding the chimichangas. Even with the detailed instructions, toward the end steps of the process I couldn't get the wrap to cooperate. This could be because I can't even do origami well, or there is a step missed in the instructions. Regardless, with the aid of some well-placed toothpicks to keep them sealed, frying them up was easy. Accompanied with homemade salsa, these chimis were more than basic.  

Pool-tine: I have to admit, I used a tip provided by Deadpool and used frozen steak fries instead of making my own. The gravy was delightful, and the instructions were clear and easy to follow. Combining the flavor of the steak fries, cheese curds, and gravy was the perfect meal after a long day. This one will become a staple in my household.

Smells Like Victory: Combining two different pancake flavors is a brilliant idea. In this case, it was chocolate and malted milk pancakes. I did omit the malt powder, since I didn’t have any on hand. The chocolate batter cooked a bit faster and the pancakes came out thinner than the plain pancakes, but the texture and flavor were great together.

With relatively simple to make recipes, Deadpool’s witty remarks, and special appearances by Cable, Cooking with Deadpool would make an excellent addition to a cookbook collection. The creative team behind this cookbook is great. Marc Sumerak is a Harvey- and Eisner Award nominated comic writer, and he earned his BFA in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. Between writing and editing comics, his body of work is impressive. Elena P. Craig is a food stylist and cookbook developer working in the field for over 25 years and she enjoys telling food stories. Ted Thomas provided the beautiful photography that accompanies the recipes.

Book Review: A Cultural History of The Punisher by Kent Worcester

A Cultural History of The Punisher by Kent Worcester, Intellect, 2023. https://www.intellectbooks.com/a-cultural-history-of-the-punisher

reviewed by CT Lim

 It is now almost a cliche to talk about how comics studies as a field has grown. There are numerous books being released almost every month - more than one can read to be updated about the latest research - a very different scenario from 20 years ago when one could possibly read every new book to keep up with the extent literature. But the more the merrier as the growth and diversity of the field can only be a good thing. Other than specific author studies (Brannon Costello on Howard Chaykin; Charles Hatfield on Jack Kirby), gendered readings (Ramzi Fawaz on The New Mutants; J. Andrew Deman on The Claremont Run) and transmedia and seriality surveys (Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer), one particular area that has expanded is the singular character studies. While most would approach a company-owned character via the lens of literature, history, cultural, and media studies, I would argue that the latest book to hit the shelves, A Cultural History of The Punisher by Kent Worcester is looking at the popular Marvel character from the refreshing perspective of political science, in spite of its title. Worcester has earlier co-edited A Comics Studies Reader (2008) and The Superhero Reader (2013). 

The breakdown of the chapters is as such: Chapter 1 asserts the importance of New York City in creating the Punisher and creating the milieu or conditions for his ascendency and popularity. I really enjoyed  the extracts from Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York (1975). I first visited NYC in 2000 and my reference points were Lou Reed albums, but the 1986 Punisher miniseries by Steven Grant and Mike Zeck would not be far behind them. Worcester argued the latter could be read together with The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987) as “the turn in mainstream comics towards more adult-oriented offerings.” (p. 141) In hindsight, the NYC I visited in December 2000 was probably closer to the violent cartoony zaniness of Garth Ennis’ rendition of the character which started in that year. 

Chapter 2 sets out the difference between the trigger-happy Punisher and the grim and gritty Punisher. Not forgetting that the Punisher is still a corporate owned character, Chapter 3 examines his interactions with other Marvel characters. Chapter 4 gets into the meat of “the Punisher’s meteoric rise during the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s.” (p. 19) This was when the character started becoming a major revenue stream with multiple monthly titles and making real money for the company. Worcester incorporates the idea of production cycle (taken from film studies) and explains how and why the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s was the first of the two Punisher production cycles to date. The end of the first production cycle coincided with the burst of the collecting bubble in 1995. (p. 184)

Chapter 5 takes a step away from the official franchise and looks at the Punisher parodies since the mid 1970s and also the challenges writers have in writing the Punisher when violent crime declined in NYC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What thus remains as his raison d'etre when the urban crisis and decay have rolled back? Chapter 6 brings us up to speed on the recent series of the last 24 years. Basically, the Garth Ennis stories starting from 2000 are the start of the second production cycle. 

Worcester explains:

While their version of Frank Castle still preferred decisive lethality over due process, the character now manifested an absurdist aspect that previous creators had eschewed. The first cycle achieves a kind of pulpish modernist realism, until its final act at least, whereas Ennis and (Steve) Dillon opt for cheeky jokes, glossy visuals, and postmodern bombast. Their story verse offers a giddy fantasia in which sadism, machoism, and gore serve comedic rather than ideological ends, and the grim and trigger-happy templates are fused. (p. 207) 

It is also during this production cycle that we see “the locus of production and consumption has migrated from print to screen, and from screen to iconography.” But Worcester’s main contention is that the Punisher “also embodies a raw, populist anger that presents an uncomfortable fit with business models and strategic plans.” (p. 20) In a way, this answers Worcester’s key research question: why are so many of us fascinated by the Punisher? (p. 20)

Witness the co-option of the Punisher by the alt-right, Trump supporters, Unite the Right and Blue Lives Matter. (p. 3) In fact, Worcester started this book in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected. (p. 239) In Southeast Asia, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte was known as the Punisher way back in 2002 when he was the mayor of Davao. He even used comics to spread his 'war on drugs' campaign in 2016. 

Where are the political science aspects I initially referred to? They are most evident in Chapter 1 where Worcester used a four-box matrix to study vigilantism - fiction, non-fiction, less violent and more violent. He concluded that this is inadequate in helping us understand the vigilante’s underlying goals and proposed an alternative typology taken from H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg’s Vigilante Politics (1973). There are three types of vigilantism - crime-control, social-group control and regime control. No surprise that the Punisher is a crime-control vigilante. (pp. 54 - 55) 

(a drawing Tan Eng Huat drew for me in 2009.
He was one of the artists for the
seventh series of The Punisher
written by Rick Remender between 2009 and 2010,
the second production cycle.)

Comics studies have incorporated trauma studies. (or is it vice versa?) Recent books include Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage (2020), edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind. A more niche study is Visualising Small Traumas: Contemporary Portuguese Comics at the Intersection of Everyday Trauma (2022) by Pedro Moura. Worcester referenced Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War (2017) by Harriet E. H. Earle in his first chapter on trauma culture. But the true strength and value of this book lies not in theories but Worcester’s close reading of the primary texts. He “harvested nearly five decades’ worth of comic books and graphic novels to show how a binary-minded rageaholic ended up with a lively, sometimes ridiculous, and often socially resonant storyverse.” (p. 14) Worcester took from political theorist John Gunnelll’s concept of internal history and also the late Martin Barker’s advice of needing subtle and cautious research instruments so as to be able to grasp the flow and stresses of the stories to bring out the maneuvers and moments of decision that make the stories meaningful. (p. 15)

In that sense, Worcester also dwells into the current approach of seriality as he does not just use the trade paperbacks and compilations, but the actual monthly floppies and the very useful letter columns to gauge readers’ sentiments and response to the Punisher’s body count and arsenal over the years. 

Another thing I like about the tone of this book is that Worcester is clearly a fan of what he writes about - comics and pop culture. You catch glimpses of it when he quotes Jane’s Addiction. (p. 236) 

Singular character studies in comics studies have been around for a while. From Will Brooker’s books on Batman to recent ones by Ian Gordon (Superman), Brian Cremins (Captain Marvel), Kevin Patrick (the Phantom), Paul Young (Daredevil) and Scott Bukutman (Hellboy). Worcester’s take on Punisher is a much welcomed addition. Now if only there is a good book on Judge Dredd…

(This review was edited on April 19th, after originally being posted by the author on April 11; a version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 26:1)

Book Review: Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack

 

reviewed by Charles W. Henebry, Boston University

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack. New York: Epic Ink, 2023. 176pp. https://www.quarto.com/books/9780760375617/black-panther

Judging by its cover, lavish illustrations, and meager page count, you wouldn’t think Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration lived up to the scholarly ambitions of its title. Yet Womack manages to pack a surprising wealth of cultural references and oral history into this slender volume. Having myself analyzed the Panther by reference to the aims of his creators, I was fascinated by Womack’s reader-centered approach to the character. Prior scholarship has problematized the Panther’s status as the “World’s First Black Superhero,” given Marvel’s all-white creative staff back in the sixties. Womack implicitly responds to this criticism with a moving account of the lived experience of the superhero’s African-American fans who, in that same era, encountered the new character at the newsstand and argued with their friends about how he was connected to the Black Panther Party. And she ties this oral history to developments in contemporary history and culture, from Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, to the cosmic jazz of Sun-Ra. In so doing, she encourages us to think of the Black Panther not as corporate IP, but as one of the shared myths of our culture: “I’d reason that the Black Panther myth is bigger than its creators, an idea held by fans, writers, pencilers, and the awed alike—a myth that channels love and liberation.” Having previously published a book on Afrofuturism, Womack is well situated to deliver in this effort to claim the Black Panther as a genuine expression of the African-American experience.

While the first chapter contextualizes the creation of the Black Panther in the ferment of the late 1960s, the book is organized not by timeline but by topic: “The Panther Mystique,” “The Wakandan Protopia,” “The Modern Goddess and Futuristic Warrior Queens,” etc. Throughout, Womack works suggestively rather than analytically: in the chapter on political power, for instance, she juxtaposes the Panther with real-world political figures ranging from MLK to Mandela, but does not explicitly argue any particular parallel or connection. Some may see this as a virtue, in that it invites the reader to take an active role in making sense of the Panther’s cultural resonance. But I would have liked a more detailed account, especially in regard to lesser-known figures like Kwame Nkrumah. Without such detail, the reader is hardly in a position to weigh the real significance of Womack’s musings.

The book’s greatest strength is its oral history of fans. Besides childhood memories, the interviews offer up a variety of insights as to the Panther’s political and cultural significance. A few of those interviewed are famous; many others are identified by Womack as authors or artists. In a few cases, we are provided with no more than a name, which left me wondering what principle Womack used in choosing whom to interview.

Another strength is the book’s format: lavish full-color images predominate throughout, ranging from comics panels to news photographs. Comics are a visual medium, and it’s wonderful to see scholarship illustrated in this way. Too often, due to the cost of permissions, comics scholars see their work go to print with no illustrations whatsoever. In Black Panther as well as in an earlier book on Spider-Man, Epic Ink neatly solved the permissions problem by partnering with Marvel Comics.

But I can’t help but worry that this cure is worse than the disease. Rights holders like Marvel are unlikely to partner with scholars who train a critical eye on their history, so in the marketplace of ideas, such scholarship will be text-only and hence at a disadvantage relative to visually attractive puff-pieces. Womack’s wholeheartedly celebratory account—which interrogates neither the politics of the character’s early decades nor the politics of Marvel’s creative team—does little to allay such concerns. Interested readers will have to seek out that richly problematic history elsewhere.

Book review: Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World inside Your Head by Eliot Borenstein

 by CT Lim

Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World inside Your Head. Eliot Borenstein. Cornell University Press, 2023. 267 pages, $23.95. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501769368/marvel-comics-in-the-1970s/

Do we really need another book on Marvel Comics? Hot on the heels of Douglas Wolk's monumental All of the Marvels (2021) comes a book about lesser discussed Marvel comics of the 1970s - focusing on the literary efforts of Steve Englehart (Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, Captain America, the Avengers), Doug Moench (Deathlok, Werewolf by Night, Master of Kung Fu), Marv Wolfman (Tomb of Dracula), Don McGregor (Killraven, Luke Cage, Black Panther) and Steve Gerber (Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, Howard the Duck). I am definitely more of a Marvel zombie than I thought, and I was intrigued enough to volunteer to review this book.

There are several questions to answer:

·         Why would Eliot Borenstein, a Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, write a book about Marvel comics in the 1970s and what is the connection between that and his own discipline of Russian and Slavic studies?

·         How does this book compare to or complement Wolk's All of the Marvels?

·         Is Borenstein convincing in his arguments?

First, Borenstein has been teaching an annual general education course on graphic novels at New York University since 2007. As he explained in his preface about his 'secret origins.' the 1970s was the decade he discovered comics. But more importantly, in Marvel comics, he found a reflection of the concerns that occupied his teenage mind. As he explained, "Marvel was filled with characters who narrated their experience, second-guessing themselves. They got me out of my head by getting into theirs, which in turn helped me explore my own head better." In that sense, Borenstein pointed out Dostoyevsky was inevitable. While the fate of Rodion Raskolnikov now matters to him as much as the fate of Jean Grey, Borenstein never stopped being a comic fan nor forgot about the inner worlds and turmoil of Shang-Chi, T'Challa and Howard the Duck. (Borenstein also acknowledged the model provided by Jose Alaniz, another Slavist and fellow comics scholar, who also blurbed the book.)

It took some decades to reconcile the two worlds of Pushkin and the Punisher and to avoid incursions of having two parallel universes colliding and destroying one of them (apologies to Jonathan Hickman). Borenstein managed to construct a Battleworld (more apologies to Jim Shooter) where his two worlds coexist in his serialized blog on Marvel comics in the 1970s. This book is an extension and expansion of that - it is like the Ant-Man entering the body of the Vision to save him in Avengers #93 (drawn by Neal Adams, cover date Nov. 1971) but presented in the deluxe over-sized artist's edition format. But unlike superheroes, when we go deep into inner worlds, it is not just to save others. It is to save ourselves.

As for the comparisons with All of the Marvels, Borenstein acknowledges it as a book with "many points in common" especially Wolk's deep dive into The Master of Kung Fu, but the two approaches are very different. Borenstein made it very clear that his book is firmly planted in a crucial yet understudied decade that marks a turning point in the artistic development of the comics medium. To me, both complement each other. After reading Wolk's take on the Black Panther, you can easily pick up the Penguin classics Marvel collection with its valuable foreword and introduction by Nnedi Okorafor and Qiana J. Whittted respectively. And then move into Borenstein's chapter on Don McGregor's tortured romantic individualism and suffering black bodies.

For my third question, I must say Borenstein, makes a compelling case of the world inside your head created by the above-mentioned Marvel writers. This underscores the intentionality of these writers in focusing on creating an internal world of subjectivity for their readers. The action and violence in these Marvel comics mirror the inner (conflicted? confused?) state of the heroes and villains. I would like to linger on Borenstein's choice of phrase, "your head." It could be "our heads" but he chose yours. But this “yours” is not just the readers, but the fictional characters of Captain America, Captain Marvel and the Man-Thing as well. As Borenstein said, "I felt more like myself when I was able to sink into the minds of others." Is it a form of escapism? Or a way to figure out ourselves when we see some of our internal selves mirrored in the inner worlds of a Marvel comic?

As for the chapters, I enjoyed the Introduction the most - where Borenstein made the case for a 1990s Vertigo title, Enigma as the best Marvel comic of the 1970s. I won't go into the details as it is quite delightful to follow Borenstein's arguments when he made his case. I would just add that writer Peter Milligan's explorations into "your heads" began much earlier in his 2000 AD days when he wrote a wonderful strip, Hewligan's Haircut, drawn by the mercurial Jamie Hewlett.

You may ask what's new about these 1970s writers' approach. Didn't Stan Lee in the 1960s put forth the "drama of the visible self?" Spider-Man will talk through his problems (via internal and external monologue) while fighting Doctor Octopus. Borenstein explained: "If Lee's plots provided the opportunity to learn about his characters' inner lives, the 1970s writers often came close to prioritizing interiority over plot itself."

This goes back my own first encounters with Marvel comics in the 1970s. Having read The Beano and The Dandy British weeklies, some DC, and also Chinese comics, one of the first Marvel comic I laid my hands on was, of all things, Man-Thing #22 (cover date Oct 1975). I can't remember how I got it, but it was the most bizarre thing I had read when it landed in my hands. It starts with writer Steve Gerber writing to editor Len Wein about why he cannot continue to write the Man-Thing anymore and it just becomes more metafictional and internal from there. My curiosity about Borenstein's book probably stems from this primary reading experience.

If there is a weak chapter, it is the coda of Chris Claremont’s rise in the popular Uncanny X-Men comics of the late 1970s and 1980s. After making his argument of the complex inner worlds created by writers like Steve Gerber, Borenstein's concluding line leaves much hanging: "Claremont, his collaborators, and his heirs found that presenting their heroes as superficially complex open books was a recipe for success." He argued that Claremont's X-Men invites readers into the heroes' minds while making the process of identification effortless. I feel more elaboration and examples are needed. What led to the 'decline' of writers like Steve Englehart (who went on to write a memorable Batman run at DC as well as the Justice League of America - how does that compare to his Avengers?) and the rise of Claremont, whose interiority was not that of Gerber or Moench or Wolfman? What happen to these writers when they left Marvel and the 1970s receded into the past? Did they leave interiority behind? For example, did Wolfman follow the success of the superficiality of Claremont for his Teen Titans series in the 1980s? For that, one would have to look for answers in recent books like The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade which has chapters on Moench and Gerber, and also Steve Gerber: Conversations. It is unfortunate the Kickstarter of Moench's Aztec Ace has gone off rails with money collected and the backers not receiving their copies. Some of these comics can be reprinted and reevaluated - Gerber's Phantom Zone stories for DC, Gerber's return to Howard the Duck in She-Hulk, and McGregor's Sabre.

Borenstein states that Claremont's approach was a much more commercially appealing formula that combined the prolixity of McGregor with the declarative tradition of Stan Lee. This deserves fuller exploration. I, for one, would like to understand the rise of Claremont studies, as seen in The Claremont Run on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ClaremontRun and now also collected as a book, The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men by J. Andrew Deman (University of Texas Press, 2023).

Nonetheless, this book is an excellent read for the Marvel fan and a worthy contribution to comics studies of serialized American superhero comic books of the 1970s. Long may the 70s run. 

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.