A few days ago (Oct. 26 to be exact), a retrospective exhibition dedicated to the career of the late, great Croatian comic book artist Edvin “Eddy” Biuković opened in one of the major art museums and gallery halls, the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery, in Zagreb.
It was a nice affair: a lot of people showed up for the opening, and the exhibition was really nicely conceived and installed – and it takes up an entire floor in the gallery. It’s nice to see a comic book artist get his due like that. But it’s unfortunate that Biuković isn’t around to see it. Tragically, he died rather suddenly of a brain tumor in 1999, at the age of 30.
I won’t go into a deep dive of Biuković’s career here, as most of the people who frequent this site are comics readers and probably at least have a passing familiarity with Biuković’s work. Also, you can find a brief summary in an article about the exhibition I slapped together for Croatian Radio this past weekend.
One of the newspaper pieces that came out just before the exhibition noted that Biuković was to Croatian comic book artists what Dražen Petrović (also, unfortunately, no longer with us) was to Croatian basketball players, i.e., just like the latter seemed to open the NBA’s doors to Croatian players, so too did Biuković open the floodgates for what seems like an entire squadron of Croatian comic book artists. To be fair, a few guys like Mirko Ilić and Igor Kordej had already landed jobs in the US before (‘80s/early ‘90s), but it certainly seems like it was Biuković who really got the ball rolling. So now there’s tons of Croatian guys like pencilers/inkers Goran Sudžuka, Danijel Žeželj, Goran Parlov, Dalibor Talajić, Stjepan Šejić, and Tonči Zonjić, even the occasional writer like Darko Macan and colorists like Miroslav Mrva and Ive Svorcina, working in American comics (and I know I’ve missed a bunch of names there, and also didn’t even touch on the Bosnian and Serbian guys who also made their way to Western European and American comics, too). Heck, Croatia’s even home to some American comics guys, like colorist Matt Hollingsworth.
On a personal note, I have to say that when I was a nerdy little kid growing up in a pretty rural community in Oregon, who often felt that my very ethnic Croatian parents made me even more of an outsider at times, my head would have exploded if somebody had told me that there would be this whole contingent of Croatian creators working in American comics (kind of like the Filipino artists of the 1970s).
Curator Koraljka Jurčec-Kos, who helped set up the exhibition, speaking at the opening. The fellow with the beard just behind her holding a book is Goran Sudžuka
Anyway, back to the exhibition: it was organized by Edvin Salihović, a comics collector and dealer, and comic book artist Goran Sudžuka. The selection of works was done by Sudžuka, Salihović and Koraljka Jurčec Kos, a senior curator at the Gallery, and the three of them also came up with the display concept. What’s really cool about the works on display is that they not only include the original pages of his published comics, but also a lot of his early, unpublished work – not just school assignments but stuff he did when he was just starting out as a pre-teen and then teen. And yes, he was amazingly talented even at that point.
By the way, not to name-drop, but I know both Sudžuka and Salihović. The latter is a comics collector and dealer here in Zagreb, from whom I’ve bought (or with whom I’ve traded) quite a few books over the years, as he has a lot of American stuff. (How I met Sudžuka, by the way, is a story almost worthy of a post by itself.) Goran also wrote the text for a book that was published to accompany the exhibition, which is bilingual, i.e., the original Croatian text is accompanied by an English translation.
Below are a few shots of the pages inside (sorry for the quality on the first one, I used my camera because it couldn’t really fit well into the scanner I used):
And some paparazzi shots of the opening night crowd:
Roughly in the middle, the guy with graying hair talking to the fellow in the red jacket is prolific writer (and also cartoonist) Darko Macan.
The guy roughly in the middle, with the beard, glasses and a bag slung over his shoulder, is penciler extraordinaire Dalibor Talajić. The guy next to him, with his head slightly obscured by the beshawled (or is it bescarfed?) woman in the foreground, is Slaven Goricki, who’s a well-known figure on the local comics scene, as he’s the principal organizer of Zagreb’s annual comics convention (also just a super nice guy). Next to him is Ive Svorcina, a colorist whose work many of you may have seen in quite a few Marvel and DC publications in recent years.
Finally, I did a brief walking tour of the exhibition, just to document the scope of the whole thing. Sorry I really didn’t really stop to focus on any of the stuff on display – if I had started to do that, it would have gone on for an hour or more. The sole exception is at about the 4:30 point: I paused there specifically for the sake of Greg ‘Salacious Gif’ Burgas (although, Greg insists, that kind of stuff is much more up the alley of our buddy Travis). Anyway, if any of you want a closer look, visit the exhibition!
I knew his work best, from Grendel Tales, with Darko Macan and loved it. Really nice line work, very moody style. I’ve only seen bits and pieces of comic art from croatia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, largely thanks to Maurice Horn’s World Encyclopedia of Comics and Ervin Rustamejic’s Strip Art Features, when some of the work he handled was published, in conjunction with Malibu, via Platinum Editions (which wasn’t much). Everything I’ve seen makes me want to see more, much like (as you say) the Filipino artists who came to work for DC and Marvel. He was taken way too soon.
I only know his work from the Human Target miniseries he did with Peter Milligan and it was great. His style and that of the Gorans (Sudzuka and Parlov) really hits that sweet spot between realism and expressiveness for me. I’d love to see more of the work that group of artists did for the Croatian market.
Parlov! I knew I had forgotten someone obvious…
O.k. I added Parlov’s name to the text.
As to the work Biukovic and others did for the local market – sometimes that stuff’s kind of hard to get here as well. Newer work by current comics creators does get published occasionally in separate editions (as tpbs or HCs), but much of the older, ‘classic’ material either hasn’t been collected or has been but the books are out of print. The latter applies to a really good collection of a bunch of short pieces Biukovic drew based on Darko Macan’s scripts called Citati (literally, ‘Citations,’ although it’s better translated as ‘Tributes’ because they all reference some other thing from pop culture, like movies, TV shows, other comics, etc.).
There are, however, a few monthly magazines in Croatia, mostly notably Strip revija (‘Comics Review’), that print (or reprint) a lot of work by Croatian and other former Yugoslav artists (and also work by artists from elsewhere in Europe and America), but that’s about it. And needless to say, those are hard to find outside of the region.
If you want a good sampling of Biuković’s work from his entire career, I’d actually recommend the book I mentioned in the post – although, again, it’s only available here, and not even in bookstores, just at the gallery’s bookstore (not sure if there are plans to find a foreign distributor).
This is from a 4-page story he did in the late 1980s called “Evidence.” He was 17 years old when he did this!
I wish I had that kind of talent now! (But I’m wondering if he was just transcribing a scene from Blade Runner, or if he did something else with it? Given the title, I’m imagining some kind of ‘How do you know she was a Replicant?’ twist.)
Yes, it’s an adaptation of a scene from Blade Runner, and he did something else with it. Here’s Sudžuka’s description from the book: “Eddy adapted a scene from one of his favorite movies, Blade Runner, and in the fourth and final page he finished the story with a show trial against Ridley Scott, the movie’s director, who is convicted by an imaginary, totalitarian, female regime.”
Ah, okay. That answers that. 🙂
He was an incredible talent. He had the potential to be a modern version of Alex Toth or Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez the way he was able to build beautifully weighted and composed figures with such an efficiency of line, or produce kinetic layouts and compositions so effortlessly.
His death is a profound loss to the comics medium.
I should add, for those of you on Facebook, there is fan page dedicated to Biuković, the called “Edvin Biuković – Eddy Fan Club” (just type that into the FB search bar – any time I try to provide a hot link to an FB page or post, the link never works). The administrators and others post a lot of his art, among other things, on the page.