Friday 27 Lifestyle | Feature Friday, February 12, 2021

Serbian novelist and musician Marko Selic pos- es with the “Alan Ford” comic book, in a comics shop in Belgrade.

A visitor attends an exhibition dedicated to the “Alan Ford” comic book in Belgrade. — AFP photos A visitor attends an exhibition dedicated to the “Alan Ford” comic book.

lan Ford, a 1960s Italian comic strip of the cultural heritage of the recipient coun- statured Bob Rock. Dzamic, whose book is his work, especially when it comes to social following hapless secret agents as try,” Lazar Dzamic, who wrote a book on titled “Flower Shop in the House of Flowers”, criticism. “It is a catalogue of characters Athey battle a bizarre cast of villains, Alan Ford’s success in Yugoslavia, said at argues that Alan Ford’s sensibility resonated from our real world. We are more inclined to including one who steals from the poor and the exhibit’s opening. in the Balkans where surrealism is “not an art recognize our reality somewhere and laugh gives to the rich, was intended as satire. But form, but rather a way of life”. at it, than to sit and mourn,” Selic told AFP. for fans throughout what was then Antiheroes Readers facing soul-crushing bureaucra- Yugoslavia, the black comedy and rogue The comic features a band of misfit cy and widespread corruption recognized Erasing swastikas characters from the series felt like an accu- secret agents, including the titular Alan Ford, parts of their society in Alan Ford’s satire, he A key factor behind Alan Ford’s success rate description of their everyday reality. who operate from a flower shop. Led by a told AFP. “Latin America gave the world in the Balkans is the nimble work of transla- Created half a century ago by Italian comic nameless, ageless, wheelchair-bound char- magical realism, while our gift to the world is tors Nenad and Davor Brixy, a father and artists Lucianno Secchi and Roberto Raviola, acter known as Number One, the gang of documentary surrealism. For us, it is a natu- son who managed to transpose the distinct known by their pen names Max Bunker and antiheroes includes the kleptomaniac British ral form of social organization”. Milanese humor to the local language, creat- Magnus, the comic still enjoys a cult status in nobleman Sir Oliver, a hypochondriac known Serbian novelist and musician Marko Selic ing a new form of slang. According to Davor the Balkan countries that emerged from as Jeremiah, and the short-tempered, short- cites the comic book as major inspiration for Brixy, Yugoslavia’s communist authorities socialist Yugoslavia’s bloody collapse in the forced them to alter some of the satirical 1990s. drawings to remove sensitive political refer- Based in New York, the series offers, ences. “We had to take off the swastikas but according to various fan interpretations, criti- we could leave the Nazi uniforms. The cism of aspects of American society like American soldiers had to lose their insignia, capitalism or racism. Yet the books were and the Russians their stars,” Brixy told AFP. never translated into English and failed to “Text-wise, we didn’t need more ‘interven- reach a global audience. And while the com- tions’, because the author’s style of insulting ic’s popularity has faded in its native Italy the politicians, army or the police was sub- over the years, in Yugoslavia it was an tle”, he added. Max Bunker, one of the cre- instant hit whose influence has seeped ators of the comic, declined to speak to AFP across pop culture, remaining a reference in but has previously acknowledged the fame music and film decades later. The comic he enjoys in this corner of Europe. “I have to books themselves have also stood the test of say that people from Bosnia and time, with new editions still regularly printed Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, the whole of in the region. the former Yugoslavia, are very intelligent In Belgrade, an exhibit at the Museum of A visitor attends an exhibition dedicated because they very quickly understood my History of Yugoslavia dedicated to the series to the “Alan Ford” comic book. sense of humor and accepted it,” he told Al features original drawings and rare editions Jazeera in 2014.— AFP of the comic. It is “very rare” for a foreign cul- tural product to become “an inseparable part