Wednesday 31 July 2013

Coming up: STROKE.



Stroke is one of the two upcoming digital publications by the Flemish Indipendent Cartoonists Guild (De Vlaamse Onafhankelijk Stripgilde).
the magazine is edited by Peter Moernhout, who was kind enough to ask me to contribute to the first issue.

I'm proud to announce that my short story A Robin's Dream will be featured in this new (and hopefully succesful) editorial enterprise.

I conceived this 7-page-long-homage-slash-satyre to Batman and Robin (hence the title) almost 8 years ago, working on a suggestion sparked by an Alan Moore interview.
I cannot remember how I went from the initial concept to the final script. I believe it came all out pretty quickly, with every idea leading to the next and fitting nicely into the narrative (except for the ending, which I still find weak), but I probably simply just forget many of the problems I encountered while making it.

The Superdickery website (an hilarious collection of oddities from the pages of superhero comics, especially Superman and Batman titles between the 50's and the 70's) came in handy, providing many of the jokes and references and allowing me to be, in a nasty way, very faithful to the original material.

A Robin's Dream stayed an "unproduced script" and collected bytes of dust on my hard drive for a couple of years, when I pulled it from my files and decided to go further. Still, it did not make it very far until I decided to submit it to the Guild's Plastieken Plunk contest, where it came to Peter's attention.
My story did not make it to the podium, so I've "parked" it on the internet (it's still visible through my Facebook and Google+ profiles) waiting for a way to promote it.
Finally Peter gave me tha chance to publish it. I had to give some final touches and I was indecided whether to put the Alan Moore quote at the begginig of the story or leave it out. I've decided for the latter, beacuse it felt a little pretentious. Besides, the point of the story was to carry out the spirit of Moore's statement by means of a comic book story. Having the quote as well was a little redundant as if I didn't trust my storytelling skills.
So here we are. The magazine should be available on the App Store and other digital platforms in September.
Peter asked me to provide a note about the author (myself) and a link. Faced again witht he fact I have no website of my own, I've decided to put this blog's address as "the link".

Now I'm kind of obliged to update this as frequently as I can, and in English.


I leave you with an unused sketch for the story.


PS: before you ask me, here's Alan Moore's quote, taken from
"Comic Book Artist" issue 25 , published in 2003

“In a way, I beleive that the majority of super-heroes, if you boil them down, are nothing more than a name and a chest emblem. Let's take Batman, for exapmle. There is no resemlance between the avenging Batman created in the Thirties, the smiling avuncular Batman of the Fifties, the grim/tense/taut Batman of Neal Adams in the Seventies and Frank Miller's dark knight of the Eighties. These are not the same person. The only constant is the name and the chest emblem.
I mean, who cares about continuity, really?”

next time: Alan Moore's kikckstarter campaign or "How I wish I had more money".