From cave paintings to murals and tableau, the art form of comics has a long, rich history.
And although comics filled their share of magazine pages in the Soviet days, they never gained cult status or international fame like Batman and Spider Man did in the U.S.
Still, Ukrainians love to watch Hollywood movies about superheroes. Yet many don’t know that their plots are based on comics or graphic novels. Comics in the U.S. evolved from short strips placed in early 20th century newspapers to entire stories with graphic images. Today, comics are an integral part of America. Japan’s manga comics are also a part of everyday life.
Homegrown comics in Ukraine have their own niche but aren’t mainstream. The field’s authors are trying to change that.
Recently authors of comics gathered at an international festival of graphic stories, which took place at Kyiv’s ArtPrichal gallery on Nov. 10-25.
“We decided to organize the festival to make more people familiar with this art and to meet old friends from Ukraine and abroad,” said Andriy Humeniuk, the festival’s organizer and manager of the Black and White association of artists.
Works of artists from Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic were also presented at the festival.
Local artists are gaining in prominence too. In October, experts embraced the nation’s first top notch product: a graphic novel about the fantastic adventures of Ukrainian Cossacks titled Daogopak by Maxim Prasolov, Oleksiy Chebikin and Oleg Kolov.
Moreover, Ukrainian creations are moving beyond the country’s borders. At the comic festival Comissiya in Moscow, Ukrainian artists took top honors, including Igor Baranko for his Maksim Osa (also about Cossacks), as did Yevgeniy Pronin for his work Well. Both were published by Eugenios, practically the only publishing house that prints comics in Ukraine, located in Odesa.
Unfortunately there are still no periodicals in Ukraine, but change may be around the corner. Fans of comic books still remember the once popular K9 magazine, which was published monthly until 2009, and widely available. Now the first issue of Ukrainian manga stories Hakken Seimei was published, but only 300 copies were printed with the authors funds.
Some people believe that paying for pictures is silly, even though the work is hard.
Arkadiy Medvedev, who owns an anime goods store and is the owner of Anime Line group, said: “Many magazines, with the transition to Internet space, are free to read so why pay when you can read for free. But a magazine is hard work, a classic, you can hold it, smell the ink.”
Medvedev laments that the average person isn’t interested in comics. Stores do not want to take alternative magazines, especially homegrown ones. They buy foreign goods, some of which are of worse quality, and thus do not give opportunity to authors and publishers to make money. Authors often do the drawings themselves at their own expense, and incur losses.
Unlike in America and Japan, there is no place to learn how to draw comics in Ukraine. Octane, the comic book author of Elven Magic said he first started drawing comics in grade school. After five years of drawing, he visited the site comics.com.ua, where Ukrainian comic artists gather.
“A piece here and a piece there, and I made a list of rules of how I should or should not draw,” said Octane.
For Aleph, the artist of the Mystery comic book, drawing “is still more of an art, (and) not commerce.”
There’s no shortage of Ukrainian talented artists and there are fans of comics in Ukraine despite distribution problems and building an understanding within a wide audience. Perhaps its’ possible to have a Ukrainian comic superhero depicted on T-shirts. And that day may come sooner than later.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daria Zadorozhnaya can be reached at [email protected].
