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| Bane Kerac photo by Davor Đurinić. |
Yugoslavia was a country in the Balkans created as a kingdom in the aftermath of WWI, rebuilt as a Socialist Federal Republic after the Communist-led victory in WWII, and dissolved in a civil war that raged throughout the first half of 1990's. The history of Yugoslav comics was equally tumultuous, although less bloody. After the first tentative steps in 1920s, comics gained a foothold from about 1935 onwards, mostly in the form of newspaper strips and, soon after, weekly newsprint magazines, none of which survived the war. During the first few post-war years the Communist government looked down on the comics as an infantile drug-like product imported from the West, and it was not until 1950 that the homegrown production, first in the form of comics for children, followed by adventure strips and a new slew of the weeklies, started again. The situation changed somewhat in the mid-1960s, when Yugoslavia opened more to the free trade with the Western countries, which soon led to the import of many Italian, British, French and American comic strips. The generation of Yugoslav authors brought up on this cornucopia started producing its own works for a number of monthly magazines about a decade later, and this “Golden Age of Yugoslav Comics“ – as christened by Bane Kerac in this interview – lasted for about a decade, until the state-led economy collapsed in mid-1980s, followed by the disintegration of the whole country soon thereafter.
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| A gallery of all the characters Bane Kerac worked on up until 1988. |
Branislav “Bane” Kerac was born in 1952 in Novi Sad (in today’s Serbian province of Vojvodina) and became a professional comics artist in 1975, along with the childhood friend, and writer, Svetozar “Toza” Obradović. Kerac and Obradović created a number of short and long-lived series, their first success being Lieutenant Tara, a WWII-themed series, with Kobra, a serial about the adventures of a Yugoslav-born stuntman, following soon in Tara's footsteps. Their final joint creation was Cat Claw, a Spider-man influenced superheroine which became Kerac’s first international success (he ended writing the majority of its forty-plus episodes himself). On top of all the series he created or co-created, Bane Kerac was a powerhouse of the work-for-hire scene, setting the tone for the Yugoslav episodes of Italian hero Il Grande Blek, and becoming the head artist on the late 1980s Yugoslavia-based production of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan comics. The civil war halted most of his endeavors, so Bane found himself looking for work in the United States, where he spent the following few years working for Dark Horse (under the pen-name HM Baker), and then turning towards illustration and design to make ends meet. He returned to comics fifteen years later, working first for the French publishers, and finally finding a gainful employment drawing the Zagor series for the Italian publishing giant Bonelli.
The story of Bane Kerac – infected by comics just as they were becoming popular in Yugoslavia again, entering the profession at the most auspicious moment for a young artist, shaping the image of his country's comics for the next generation and then finding himself scrounging for work ever since – mirrors the history of comics in the Balkans during the past fifty years. The interview which follows discusses his path, dreams and influences, and was conducted by Darko Macan in February 2023 for a book collecting all of Kerac's Cat Claw work (published by Fibra in Zagreb, Croatia, in May of 2023). It's been edited for IJOCA and translated by Draško Roganović and the author.
IN FAVOR OF HAPPY ENDINGS
(An interview with Bane Kerac)
DM: When did you start reading comics?
BK: It’s the same old story, but a nice one, so it’s worth repeating. It was January of 1958, I was five and a half years old. My mom bought me the fifth issue of Kekec weekly at the newsstand, and since I couldn’t read it myself, but was gawking wide-eyed at the pictures, she’d read it to me. In fact, there’s a prelude to that story, because my mother was a huge cinephile, and would take me to the movies ever since I was a baby. Back then it wasn’t such a big deal to take babies to the cinema, because babies weren’t very spoiled and wouldn’t whine much. And even if I started crying, my mom would get out and that was that. Or she’d breastfeed me in the dark, so I’d calm down.
DM: So, you were weaned on movies along with your mother’s milk?
BK: Most likely. Anyway, I went to the movies with my mother until I was seven, eight or nine, and quite frequently, too, because my mom liked to check out all the new releases. She wasn’t at all picky when it came to genres, so I saw a bunch of westerns, too. But the fateful year was 1962, when Crtani romani comic first came out in pocket format. That’s where I saw those true masters: Arturo del Castillo, Alberto Breccia, Alberto Salinas and Jesus Blasco, who left a huge impression on me.
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“Dead or Alive”, a
story drawn by Kerac in a school notebook when he was thirteen (1965). |
DM: How many kids read comics back then?
BK: All of them. Girls not so much, but it was practically our only entertainment. Comics were movies brought to paper.
DM: And when did television come into your life?
BK: It came when Toza Obradović’s father bought a television set for his family. Toza Obradović was my neighbor from the next street over, a bit older than me, and we went to the same school. He was two grades above me, but we bonded over comics and we would trade them. The first TV-shows I’ve watched were Jungle Jim with Johnny Weissmuller, and Dennis the Menace. That was around 1963-1964. I remember a dozen of us kids rushing to the door of Toza’s place. When his mom, auntie Draginja, would open them, she’d see that wild bunch, roll her eyes and say: “All right, get in!”
DM: What was his father’s line of work?
BK: His father was a military man, and a relatively well-off one, so Toza was able to keep up even with the more expensive weeklies that would put a much bigger strain on the budget of us working class kids. I would buy Kekec or borrow Politikin zabavnik, which I didn’t really care for, from my neighbor. In Zabavnik I’d read Flash Gordon, but the rest didn’t really interest me all that much.
DM: You weren’t interested in the other comics, or the articles?
BK: I didn’t care at all about the articles. I considered them a waste of time, when you could, like, dive right into an adventure instead. I also read the daily comic strip page in Dnevnik, which had Carol Day, Ben Bolt, Johnny Hazard and Scamp. I loved reading Carol Day when I was twelve or thirteen. It was like a TV-show, a serious comic, unlike Ben Bolt, which was just plain fun, or Johnny Hazard, which was even more fun.
DM: How do you gauge the levels of fun?
BK: It’s easier if we compare it to film: the movie Home from the Hill with Robert Mitchum, for example, was a serious film for that day and age, but some other western like, I don’t know, The Trap with Richard Widmark, that was just plain fun.
DM: So, you say you took Kekec and “gawked” at the pictures?
BK: Yes, because they were in color, so they brought me the same feeling as the cinema. The color films started here back in 1956. Up until then, I’d only seen comics in Politikin zabavnik and at my neighbors’, the Erdeljani brothers, who had a bunch of pre-war comics. But those were all black and white comics.
DM: You mentioned Crtani romani. What set it apart from other comics magazines?
BK: Those were complete stories. And, the most important thing for me in those 48 pages was the tempo. It would tell a lot of story in a relatively small space. Each issue of Crtani romani, if you filmed it shot by shot, would amount to an hour-and-a-half-long movie. That’s really fantastic. In Crtani romani you’d never have the main hero punching a bandit, and in the next panel have the bandit falling down and breaking a chair. No, that would be a single panel.
DM: In a way, such narration was anti-comics-like, just jumping from scene to scene?
BK: Yes, but those artists were so outstanding, they knew dynamics inside and out, so that you’d imagine three more scenes for every panel you've got. You didn’t need anyone to draw those sequences for you, because they would be a natural extension of the drawings.
DM: When did you start telling artists apart, and when did you start telling apart the good ones from the not-so-good ones?
BK: I could tell them apart right away, they immediately piqued my interest. On some comics I would notice the artist’s signature, and as for others, I had no clue what their names were. I discovered some of those only when Plavi vjesnik weekly started running a column about comic book heroes, which would have a pair of drawings by each and the name of the artist. That is where I found out about Del Castillo. For a long time I called Jesus Blasco “Blajlo”, because that’s how I deciphered his signature. I still have a sketchbook somewhere, where I copied signatures of some sixty artists that I knew and could tell apart. It was only in the mid-1970s, when the first series of Strip Art magazine edited by Ervin Rustemagić appeared, that they started regularly listing creators and publishing interviews with the famous artists. That’s where I saw that those artists meant something to someone, that they’re sort of, how do I put this... normal people? All the kids treated comic book artists like some supernatural beings, they couldn’t imagine someone sitting at a desk and drawing comics. The comics simply existed, there, in their hands. I’m actually glad that I didn’t immediately meet Žarko Beker or Jules, and figure out they were regular people, because I would lose some of that sense of wonder.
DM: Did Toza Obradović love comics as much as you?
BK: He greatly loved both films and comics, same as me. We loved the same heroes and the same movies, we had the same taste. For example, Toza agreed with me that Man of the West with Gary Cooper was a crappy movie because there were only three gunshots in the entire film, they just talked on and on in some cabin. Screw that kind of western! At the same time, we both loved films like Blood for a Silver Dollar with Giuliano Gemma, because it was all gunshots and fistfights.
DM: Did Toza ever draw?
BK: He tried drawing. He was a visual guy, he knew when to put in a close-up, when to put in a wide shot, he could instinctively put in “American shots” and other things that – back then – we didn’t even have the names for.
DM: Did Toza ever try to draw professionally?
BK: No, he just inked two episodes of Lieutenant Tara when we were on a tight deadline.
DM: And how did that turn out?
BK: Awful, but it worked. It wasn’t that bad. It was okay. But he never really tried to work on that. Very early on he opted to be a scriptwriter, realizing he wasn’t as good an artist as me. Let’s say you have two guitarists, and one is much less skilled – of course he’s the one who’ll switch to drums.
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| Kerac drumming for the GeroMetal band in 1994. |
DM: Was that the case with you? Is that why you switched to playing drums in your band?
BK: No, that wasn’t the case with me. <Laughs.> I started on drums, because there was no way I could play the guitar.
DM: Because...?
BK: I simply didn’t have great coordination between my left and right hand.
DM: And you don’t need that to play drums?
BK: You do, but I realized that way too late. By then I’d already started drumming and... I’m actually a mediocre drummer. I never thought I was very good.
DM: You played drums before you started doing comics, then you played in the 90s, and now you’re playing again?
BK: My music career runs parallel to my comics career. When I was thirteen, in the 7th grade, I started drawing complete comics in my school notebooks – a “special issue” of Crtani romani, I wrote it and everything. In 7th grade Slavko Pejak transferred to my school from Bački Petrovac, he was also a comics-lover, but he loved rock’n’roll as well. Then came The Beatles, The Stones, Manfred Mann and that whole crowd, so together we’d listen to music and write and draw comics. We started a bunch of comics, because at that age you never finish what you started. One week you’re reading the Modesty Blaise strip, so you start on something crime-oriented with a female lead, but then Spartacus comes out, and you’re drawing Roman gladiators. You’re jumping from one topic to another, onto what interests you the most. And, of course, the first two pages you do are insanely detailed. Then your enthusiasm drops, so it turns into dumb goofing around and low humor, and then it never gets finished. But I’d finish those comics in my school notebooks. That was the difference.
DM: Why did comics and rock’n’roll grab so many people at the same time?
BK: Well, at least in our case, it was because of the simultaneous birth of modern comics and the arrival of rock’n’roll to Yugoslavia. Zenit magazine featured the first Daredevil comic I saw, which had a completely different approach to comics, so dynamic all of a sudden. Even though Crtani romani had more text compared to Flash Gordon or other syndicated comic strips, in Daredevil there was, unexpectedly, a scary amount of text, a completely different narrative philosophy. Finally, Zagor and Tex Willer arrived on our newsstands and at once we had the entire world covered, genre-wise. You had Panorama magazine with Oumpah-Pah, the Franco-Belgian comics like Luc Orient, and it’s like we’re standing in front of the record store. Because at the same time the record store is getting The Dave Clark Five, The Stones, The Beatles, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, Small Faces, and so on. So, suddenly, both of those worlds are opening up, and they both have a strong flavor of the West.
DM: When you were drawing in those notebooks, did you think you were making real comics, or were you just playing comics?
BK: Well, it was something in-between. That was my training for the real deal. Immediately after that, after Daredevil showed up, and when I found out, can’t remember how, that you have to do it with ink on Bristol paper, that’s when I started drawing seriously.
DM: But even before that you thought you could become an artist?
BK: As soon as I finished elementary school, I knew I’d draw for a living.
DM: Why?
BM: Because I knew how to do it.
DM: How did you realize you knew how to do it?
BK: Because the things I drew looked a lot like the stuff that got published. So, just through pure comparison. I never imagined myself as some sort of a grand artist. I would simply draw something, and it was close enough. I could copy, let’s say, a Prince Valiant drawing without too many mistakes, unlike my peers.
DM: How much is it a necessity, and how much is it a mistake to learn drawing comics by looking at other comics?
BK: You know what, this might come off as a bit immodest, but even the “real” artists learned their craft by copying and assisting the great painters. That’s got nothing to do with academic studies, attending lectures and such.
DM: Would you copy the art by putting it in front of you, or would you look at it and then later draw from memory?
BK: No, no, I’d copy it directly. But some things just stick in your mind... Toza and I had an interesting system. Back in my yard, in Sarajevska street, we had a huge apricot tree: deep shade, sunshine during summer holidays, and there was this wooden table with two benches. There we’d bring a bunch of Crtani romani issues, a stack of papers and sharpened pencils. Then Toza would start counting in his head, I’d say: “Stop!”, and it would be, for example, number 31. So we’d take out that issue, he’d start counting in his mind again, I’d say: “Stop!”, and it would turn out to be number 24. That would be issue 31, page 24. Then he’d count again, but only up to five, because back then there wouldn’t be more than five panels per page. One-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five, and then it would be, let’s say, the third panel. Third panel on page twenty-four in issue 31, and then your goal is to draw it.
DM: How old were you?
BK: Around ten, eleven, twelve. But, you know why we did all that? We would copy comics even before that, but we’d only pick the panels we liked, and so we drew, say, Eddy Shaftoe shooting in a semi-crouch about a hundred times, and all the other panels not even once. So I said: not on my watch, now we’re gonna take this seriously!
DM: You realized that drawing comics includes drawing even the things you don’t feel like drawing?
BK: I realized very early on that drawing is a grind. When you get some incredibly uninteresting image, like a horseman riding into town, and you have to draw a bunch of buildings and windows – ouch! But discipline is discipline, and that’s how I learned it. Toza didn’t have much discipline, that’s one thing he lacked.
DM: Some of your earlier comics were cartoonish. When, or rather, how did you make up your mind between the cartoonish and realistic style?
BK: I didn’t make up my mind at all, I drew how it came to me. If I read Marijac, then immediately after I’d sit and do stylized drawings. If Panorama published Oumpah-Pah, I’d draw cartoonish Indians, but if they published Luc Orient, I’d draw spaceships. I would literally sit down at my table the moment I’d come back from the cinema, and try to draw the things I’d just seen.
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| A Lieutenant Tara drawing from 1983. |
DM: Did you opt for realism, when deciding to do comics professionally and submitting Lieutenant Tara, because of its commercial viability?
BK: Yes, and because it tied well with the WWII theme of comics about the Partizans (Yugoslav resistance fighters in WWII). Toza and I actually wanted to do something like Lt. Blueberry, because of our fascination with Giraud. But we couldn’t go to Dnevnik and offer them a western, because they were already publishing things like that.
DM: That was back in 1975? How old were you?
BK: I was twenty-three.
DM: How did you two decide to set off into professional waters?
BK: We ran into each other one time, accidentally, after we’ve been apart for seven or eight years. “What are you doing now?” “Well, I draw a bit.” “Well, I write a bit...” Toza was just starting out in sports journalism and he had a friend on Dnevnik’s staff, who told us: “Okay, there is room for up-and-coming creators, no problem, just make a couple of pages and we’ll show them to the editors, see if they accept them.” They did, and so Lieutenant Tara started in Zlatni kliker magazine #10.
DM: What was the length of those episodes?
BK: Ten, twelve, sixteen, some even eight pages, depending on how much we could manage that month. Later on we realized we were severely underpaid compared to some other people... I asked for a higher page rate, Dnevnik wouldn’t give it to us, so Toza and I packed our bags and went to YU strip magazine. We’d realized there is room there for us, because they were publishing comics exclusively by Yugoslav authors. We got lucky and got a meeting with an editor who didn’t know much about comics. I've shown him a stack of Lieutenant Tara pages, about forty of them, to check out, and he looked at the first page very carefully, he was a bit faster with the second, the third one he just skimmed...
DM: A true editor!
BK: ...and by the fourth one he said: “I can see you are real pros!” and handed the pages back to us. And for us it was a huge ego boost, to hear that from an editor of a comics magazine. We didn’t have a clue that he didn’t have a clue. So we were talking to him, overjoyed, and he says to us: “Okay, make us something!” “Well, what should we make?” “I don’t know, something!” He didn’t really know either. Toza and I had already talked about Kobra, how we would make a real home-grown comic with a Yugoslav hero, so we told the editor: “Here, we have this idea about Yugoslav stuntman who is travelling the world and getting into trouble.” And he told us: “Great, do it!” So we went home, made the first episode, gave it to him, and he said: “Excellent, go talk to so-and-so to get paid.” And suddenly we felt like world-class stars.
DM: Who decided episodes of Kobra should be 20 pages long?
BK: No one said they should be twenty pages long. That was just sort of my monthly rhythm. Drawing 20 Giraud-like pages a month... I was actually an idiot. Later on, we figured out that Brana Nikolić was getting more money for his marker doodles that lacked any effort – albeit not talent – than I got for Kobra. And that’s what led to us going over to Forum, yet another publisher.
DM: I notice that the motive for moving on is always the same. Did YU strip ever interfere with the contents?
BK: Well, no. Not in any real censorship sense. Our first quasi-censorship – when I first realized that the editor’s mindset was “let’s not rock the boat, so something doesn't happen”, even though “something” wasn’t clearly defined – came about when Toza in Tara wrote in a character called “Curly”. I promptly drew him as the bald Telly Savalas. Unfortunately, I drew him too well, and he really looked like Savalas, so the editor said: “Better put some hair on him so Telly Savalas doesn’t sue us!”
DM: Did you like WWII movies, or did you just picked the Partizan theme for Tara to get greenlit easier?
BK: Well, there was no particular fondness for the genre. We considered Yugoslav WWII movies like Battle of Sutjeska and Battle of Neretva as some sort of spaghetti western. But back then they made one very serious, even good film, a true Partizan western, that really moved us. It was called Maiden Bridge. It told a story of a prisoner trade-off on Maiden Bridge, so you had Partizans, three or four of them, transporting some German prisoners, and it was like a confined space drama. One Partizan had everyone in his life murdered by the Germans, so he wanted a revenge, then you had a German good guy, who’s an aristocrat and doesn’t condone Nazism... Maiden Bridge might have even directly inspired us to make a Partizan western.
DM: If I may ask a political question, what were your feelings towards Yugoslavia?
BK: Well, like all kids born in Yugoslavia, we never felt any pressure or oppression. No tyranny, no partocracy, nothing like that.
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| A page from Lieutenant Tara (script by Toza Obradović). |
DM: You never considered Partizan movies as some sort of ideological indoctrination?
BK: No, I mostly considered them bad movies. It was always the same: these guys shoot and kill hundreds of Germans. It was the logic of westerns – a big deal! Tara wasn’t done because we were ordered to, we didn’t have to describe certain events, or even stick to history all that much. It was more like, how do I put this... American westerns from the 1950s weren’t even cowboy films, they were dramas, theatrical plays masquerading in cowboy clothes. You couldn’t see them rounding up cattle, or what have you. Gary Cooper was always neat and clean, he’d get a little bit dirty only if he got into some barn fistfight. But then, in 1964, there came A Fistful of Dollars, as well as our teenage fascination with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, so it was only natural that Lieutenant Tara got the face of Clint Eastwood.
DM: Where did your desire for humor in something serious come from? I don’t know if you ever worked on anything that was completely serious.
BK: Well, I did, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Even in that perfectly serious work there was always some goofing around I had to put in.
DM: Or some reference.
BK: Yes. I quite like references and homages. I don’t shy away from that. I never hid what inspired me. Here’s a curio: a real example of plagiarism that I did in my youth was in the early episodes of Lieutenant Tara. There was a scene where a German Shepherd dog jumps on some of our guys, but – how do you draw a German Shepherd? And so I directly copied Blasco’s German Shepherd from The Steel Claw. Nobody noticed, but I was ashamed of it.
DM: And so you decided to never again copy German Shepherds from Blasco?
BK: Among other things, but even when I copy some scene, I don’t totally copy it. And when I do copy it totally, you can plainly see it’s an homage and it’s not a secret. For example, when I redrew a Prince Valiant scene for Tarzan, it’s so obviously the scene when Valiant stands in front of King Sligon, you just know it. You can’t say “He copied it from Prince Valiant”, when it’s clear that it was copied for a purpose, and not because I wanted to get off easy.
DM: How important to you is this conversation with comics that came before you? Or do you simply do it for your own entertainment?
BK: Well, no, you see, of course I don’t do it just for me. It’s a kind of communication with the reader. The heavy metal fan in me is looking for another heavy metal fan, the reader. And so, the more of those heavy metal fans who like my comics gather around them, the happier I am. I have a bunch of Judas Priests mentions, references like that, with the occasional Grand Funk Railroad. Or these things I scribble down on my originals. <Holds up almost an entire diary entry written on the margins of a Zagor page.> That’s because I’m frustrated that I can’t put them in the comic. Although I snuck some even in Zagor: there’s a John Lord saloon, Hotel Morris...
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| The very first page of Kobra (1979), (script by Toza Obradović). |
DM: You said you started thinking about Kobra as a Yugoslav character. Why did you start another comic series alongside Tara?
BK: So we’d have more work. I could do Tara in my sleep.
DM: What was the thinking behind Kobra’s creation?
BK: We saw that YU strip was something completely different than Zlatni kliker, because it was open to all genres. So, why not try that out?
DM: Give me some context regarding the creation of YU strip.
BK: First you had Dečje novine, a weekly magazine published in Gornji Milanovac and geared towards kids, and in there you had the comic Mirko i Slavko – a story about two boys who fought against Germans in WWII – initially as a weekly half-pager. Then, because it became really popular, and the magazine got a lot of letters, with every other letter asking for more Mirko i Slavko, Dečje novine decided to start publishing a separate magazine with only comics in it.
DM: And that’s how their comics publishing came to be?
BK: Yes, with the Nikad robom (Unconquered) series. Mirko i Slavko were in the first issue, the second had Radivoj Bogičević's comics about WWI, then Kokan...
DM: The concept was “the heroic battles of our people throughout history”?
BK: Yes, and every Yugoslav federal republic was represented: Radivoj Bogičević, Nikola Mitrović-Kokan and Žika Atanacković did the Serbian history, Ivica Bednjanec was tasked with Croatian history, Leo Korelc represented Slovenes, Ljubomir Filipovski Macedonians, and Ahmet Muminović Bosnians. Soon after, Dečje novine launched Eks almanah, a magazine featuring foreign comics, and then YU strip as a special edition dedicated to Yugoslav production, because all of a sudden a large number of authors appeared who weren’t the right fit for Nikad robom.
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| A later page from Kobra, (script by Toza Obradović). |
DM: So, back to Kobra: what was the inspiration?
BK: Bernard Prince by Hermann and Greg. They even looked alike. Bernard Prince travels the world, he has his boat, and gets into adventures. So, we took the concept of a guy who travels around and gets into trouble, but we didn’t want him to be a sailor, so as not to be a direct copy. Now, our main idea was that it had to be someone from these parts.
DM: Was it a personal desire, or did you think it would be beneficial market-wise?
BK: It was because we wanted to make a proper Yugoslav comic. And if you could have a Frenchman travelling around the world and having adventures, then you could have an our guy, too. That wasn’t a problem. A really big problem was the name of our hero. You know, a series called Stanko Pribivalić, or something like that, isn’t really all that. He should have a real name, we named him “Slobodan Marković” right away, and for a reason, but you can’t name a comic like that and expect it to sell!
DM: And what was that reason for the name?
BK: He was Lieutenant Tara’s son. Tara’s name was Slobodan Mišović, and he had a son with the nurse Višnja Trandafilović, who he fell in love with during the Lieutenant Tara series. At the end of the war they transferred to OZNA (Yugoslav secret service), and ultimately got killed while chasing some Chetnik rebels around our mountains. But they managed to kill a couple of the main Chetniks, so Captain Marković, who was Tara’s commanding officer during the war, took in their son, born around that time, in order to protect him from any blood vendetta. He changed the kid’s surname to his own to cover his tracks. Shortly after, he got a job as a consul or an attaché in Hong Kong, and that’s where little Marković had his first contact with martial arts. That was the basis for a tale we were planning to make one day, as an “origin story”.
DM: I think it sounds better as is, shrouded in mystery.
BK: Yeah. So, that’s the story. But, a comic titled “Slobodan Marković”? Nah. So, what are we going to do? Then Toza says: “Well, if he’s a karate master who’s as fast as a cobra, why not simply call him Kobra?“
DM: So, it’s just a coincidence you have “K” for Kerac and “Obra” for Obradović?
BK: Wow, that’s a real eye-opener... It absolutely never crossed my mind, let alone Toza’s. That’s a really lovely coincidence.
DM: Was Dečje novine pleased with Kobra?
BK: Dečje novine was thrilled with Kobra. I’d deliver them an episode per month. Okay, that didn’t last too long, I delivered four episodes, then it became sparser. The more I improved as an artist, the harder it became. I would literally send some episodes to them the evening before the print deadline. For some episodes I even asked Sibin Slavković to assist me. I’d literally go to Sibin’s on a Saturday, and with his help finish an episode of Kobra, then on Monday it would go straight to the printers, to the repro-camera. Whew! It was a crazy tempo, but thanks to that tempo... I always said that I didn’t stand out from my generation so much when it came to talent – there were better artists than I – but I made my mark because I was everywhere. You couldn’t open your fridge without a Bane Kerac comic popping out at you.
DM: Was that an intentional strategy?
BK: No, I just loved drawing. So, right after elementary school I knew I’d draw comics for a living. But it was important to finish some schooling back in those days, and to find a steady job. Drawing comics didn’t look like a valid profession to me, nor to my parents. And since there was a dental technician in our neighborhood who owned his house and lived quite comfortably, I decided to enroll in dental school. My intent was to work mornings as a dental technician, so that I could peacefully draw in the afternoon. Which was all fine and dandy, but once I graduated my senior year, so did 90 other people. At that moment there was some 400 dental technicians waiting for a job at the national employment agency. So, what else could I do? I went to college, to become a dentist. There, at the end of my freshman year, I aced anatomy – it interested me, because of my drawing – but I failed chemistry. Though I didn’t waste a year. My future best man, Slavko Pejak, enrolled in Art school for Teachers. Back then they had to draw there almost as much as at the Academy of Fine Arts, so I’d go to classes with him. I would literally pretend to be a student, because the professors and students over there had no idea who was enrolled and who wasn’t... That was quite useful, there I came in touch with art history, materials technology, things like that. I didn’t care one bit about how many eggs you needed to make tempera paint, but I picked up some knowledge, like the golden ratio, perspective and such.
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| Kobra reappears in a Tarzan episode drawn by Kerac. |
DM: For YU strip you didn’t stop at Kobra. There were shorter, experimental stories. Sometimes it seemed to me like you wanted to try out all genres and all formats?
BK: I did!
DM: Why?
BK: Because I was curious. Well, some of those things came about purely out of spite. Back then there was this clique of Belgrade critics who were really championing Novi Kvadrat art group,1 and were advocating for pure art approach in comics. Us commercial artists, we didn’t separate comics that way. We realized straight away that Novi Kvadrat drew heavily on Metal Hurlant. Those were all okay comics, they weren’t direct copies, but they copied that mindset.
DM: Well, you copied Crtani romani.
BK: I did. Therefore, I didn’t consider it a crime, though I did think it was a crap move that those critics were bashing me, while praising them. On the other hand, they forgot one really harsh truth: when an alternative artist breaks through, he becomes a commercial one. Igor Kordey, one of the Novi Kvadrat group, is a stellar example of that.
DM: How fast did you work on Kobra?
BK: A page a day. I’d sit down in the morning, pick up the script, read it, lay out the page, pencil it in, and in the afternoon I’d do the inks, up until the evening.
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| A self-portrait by Bane Kerac from 2013. |
DM: How did you collaborate with Toza on Kobra and Tara? Would you get the full script, read it, and then draw it, or would you change things around?
BK: Toza wrote good synopses, even detailed outlines for twenty-page comics. He had a really good sense of rhythm, he put cuts in all the right places, he had a real knack for that. But he had a bit more difficulty with the dialogue. It would be good enough for your average reader, but it was so sterile, so stereotypical, devoid of all humor or literary flair, of all originality. It was literally as if he took lines from a million previous comics, wrote them down, and would just regurgitate them. Twenty times he’d have the bad guy charge the hero with “Now you’ll pay!” And the hero would always reply: “Oh, really? We’ll see about that!” And I was horrified by that.
DM: But he was good enough to work as a scriptwriter?
BK: He was. And he had ideas. The first two or three episodes of Kobra were completely written by him. Then I started to ignore his breakdowns. I’d just, you know, take the gist of a page, and lay it out the way I wanted. I’d subtract or add in panels and, so he wouldn’t get confused when finalizing the dialogue, I’d put in my own dialogue. At first he’d change them back to his own words, but as time went by he’d leave more and more of my dialogues in. During the final Kobras that I did with Toza, I was pretty much doing everything myself, him providing just a bare-bones synopsis. By then he’d become pretty much indifferent to it all, drained by the production tempo that makes you constantly come up with new ideas. He’d already got a job in the TV archives, and he worked as a sports writer for various magazines. He also kept up with basketball, he was a basketball coach, and he actively played the sport.
Endnotes:
1 Novi kvadrat group was active in Zagreb from 1976-1979. Its most prominent members were Mirko Ilić and Igor Kordey.
continued in part two
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