Comics fans in southern Europe celebrated the triple anniversary of cult publications in 2019 · Global Voices
Comics magazines Strip Revija Večernjeg Lista (Croatia), Politikin Zabavnik and Stripoteka (Serbia) with articles about 50-year anniversaries of <PERSON>, Dikan and Stripoteka. Photo by Global Voices, CC BY.
For comics fans in southern European countries, 2019 will be remembered as the year of a triple nostalgic jubilee of cult series: the 50th-anniversary publication of influential Italian comics ‘Alan Ford’, of the ‘Yugoslav Asterix’ Dikan, and of Serbian magazine Stripoteka.
<PERSON>, an Italian comics with cult status across the former Yugoslavia
<PERSON>, the comics parody of secret agent stories was created in May 1969 by the Milan-based writer <PERSON>, known under his pen name <PERSON> and artist <PERSON>, more known as <PERSON>. <PERSON> company published the anniversary issue, number 600 in Italy in May 2019.
The <PERSON> series combines the Italian tradition of commedia dell'arte with satirical irreverence through the themes of injustice and backwardness, from politics and economics to human stupidity, bigotry, and greed. It became popular two years after its publication with the introduction of the villain <PERSON> (known as <PERSON> in ex-Yugoslavia) in its 27th episode. This ‘alcoholic opposite of <PERSON>,’ an anti-superhero who literally ‘steals from the poor to give to the rich’ because as a street sweeper, he despises the lack of hygiene of lower classes, made the series a bestseller in its own country.
While the attempts to export this comics series to France, Denmark and Brazil failed, <PERSON>, alongside other Italian comics like <PERSON>, became a fixture of the urban culture of Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s.
Billboard in Zagreb, Croatia, advertising the book “Halo Bing” dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the cult comics <PERSON>, depicting the title character. 260
Photo posted in May 2019 by Meta.mk News Agency, CC BY.
<PERSON> was first published in Yugoslavia in 1972 as part of the Superstrip imprint of the Croatian newspaper company Vjesnik. It soon became widely popular and gained cult status mainly because the original humor benefited from the excellent translation by the editor and journalist <PERSON> and later by his son. Both had been replacing whole segments of the text with their own mature jokes while using specific Croatian idioms.In 2015, the town of Varaždinske Toplice even erected a memorial plaque to <PERSON> for his contribution to the promotion of the Croatian language.
This comics had an enormous influence on popular culture in Yugoslavia, across the several languages spoken in the country. It inspired comedy productions such as Serbian movies (The Marathon Family, Balkan Express), Bosnian TV series “Surrealists’ Top Chart,”, as well as a political satire in the Slovenian newspaper Mladina (which fabricated an ‘apocryphal’ episode of the comics featuring Yugoslav leader <PERSON>) and underground music with critical lyrics by Macedonian ska-punk band Superhiks.
The 50th anniversary was celebrated through public exhibitions displaying original panels and paraphernalia in Milan, but also in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, as well as in two events in Belgrade.
Some of these events were quite high-brow, like the exhibition “Alan Ford Runs a Lap of Honour” (a reference to the local title of the film Marathon Family) that took place in the National Gallery of Slovenia and can be seen in the following video:
The popularity of the <PERSON> comics was studied by sociologists, media and communication experts from almost all former Yugoslav republics. The author of one of these books, <PERSON>, explained its appeal in an article:
Razlog zbog kog je <PERSON> jedino na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije postao to što jeste, postao je naš i nigde u svetu nije bio toliko popularan, uključujući i rodnu Italiju, je u tome što je rezonovao sa tom bivšom zemljom i to na razne načine. 260