So – here is the new issue of Stripburger special. Greetings from Cartoonia – the Essential Guide of the Land of Comics sports quite unique idea – gathering artists from different countries and asking them to write down 3 things that are crucial to their home country. Then they swapped those things between different artist and asked them to create a comic about them. Phew. That’s Cartoonia allright. So I got someone’s three things , and somebody else got what I came up with for representation of Poland.

You can see few pages of my contribution here.

Enjoy them in color, because they’re printed in grayscale. But not to worry, I’m pretty sure this comic will end up in a separate, full color album one day. Anyway – it was supposed to be a small comic, but turned out to be a 20-page story. It’s Revolutions – my main comic series. My three objects that I had to base my comic on were: wayside shrine, the neanderthal flute and Janezek of Carniola (who turns out to be the main character of the story). Can’t tell you much more about the story…

In Greetings from Cartoonia, 12 modern comic creators, half of them from Slovenia and the other half from various European countries, entered a colorful comic-book-styled intercultural dialogue. The results of this irresponsible behavior are fantasy-filled postcards from the involved countries that don’t pay attention to stereotypes. Slovene authors used their foreign colleagues’ homelands (Italy, Finland, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Romania) as motifs for their comics. Slovenia was used in the same manner by other artists. All authors have used ‘objects of inspiration’ gathered from the cultural treasuries of the involved countries. Among these are architectural types, animal species, car models, traditional folk products, mythological beings and so on. Each artist created a comic story that takes place in the chosen land based on a handful of objects typical for that country. The emerged comic-portraits of the countries quickly got out of hand and mutated to Cartoonia, a completely new, original trans-national entity. A safe haven for those that think the world lacks sympathy for comics, an art form they create or worship. The book is an indispensable guide to this unpredictable, sometimes dangerous, wonderfully bizarre and bizarrely wonderful country.

That was an official promo that I found on Top Shelf’s website. The book came to me in a nice package with lots of additional stuff:

Cartoonia postcards. Those sheets of paper were used for twitting before the twitter was invented. It’s quite the same, only in real life. People used to send them to each other from vaactions or trips to foreign countries, as in you go somewhere, buy a postcard there and send it back home to your folks to let them know how good you have, and they would get it and envy you.

There’s also this big map of Cartoonia with all objects indicated as long with names of countries they’re from (countries’ names are purposely misspelled to indicate the fantasy nature of the whole project).

Cartoonia pencils, unfortunately they came too late for being actual tools in the creation of Cartoonia comics. But they’ll probably be used in next projects, mine for sure, as well as other comic artists that took part in this project. So there will be a itsy bitsy tiny bit of Cartoonia in upcoming comic books from all over Europe. That’s what I think.

And there are also Cartoonia erasers. It’s a piece of rubber used to ctrl+Z when you’re drawing on an actual paper. But it can only remove the pencil featured above as I assume, so it’s like really old-timey ctrl+Z. But still. You can correct your errors to some extent with this item. Not that I make errors. But still.

And there was this extra package:

Inside there were 20 copies of a  poster I created for Cartoonia. There are only 40 copies in existence, and the other 20 will be available for purchase. Each artist was supposed to create one, and they printed those using an old method of screen printing (40 copies each). This method is so old that even I can’t explain you what that is. But here’s the poster: