WOSTOK: All I was thinking of when I was 12 years old was how to become as good professional cartoonist as all these great French roll model artists, I tried to imitate them but I was not very successful and then one day I realized that I should try to make my own unique style.

PART TWO - Feedom of expression in my inner world

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The first part of this presentation was discussing freedom of expression and how to fight for it in the outside world, but before I even had to think about it there was this inner freedom to be gained . I grew up reading first Italian commercial comics and later comics from French-belgic school. All I was thinking of when I was 12 years old was how to become as good professional cartoonist as all these great French roll model artists. Of course that meant clear line style, great discipline with no improvisations, high level of predictability and so on. I try to imitate them but I was not very successful and I thought maybe I should buy professional equipment and than I shall become real good professional. That didn’t help either and I started to tear apart and burn my early comics deeply unsatisfied with art I managed to produce at that time. I even quit drawing comics thinking I am not gifted enough to draw them. And then one day I realized that I should try to make my own unique style. That was the real turning point in my life and this process was very long and slow but at the end I succeeded. When I look at my whole process of development I realize that what I considered my “Inability to draw good” was actually a rebellion of my inner being against attempts of my ratio to try to force me to become an imitator of some of these famous cartoonists.
And the whole case of production of „ Robusto !!! “ Serial is a good example about possible obstacles on the way to freedom of expression and how to get over them. Those "obstacles" are often unconscious and invisible ... When I first started writing script I wanted to make a crossover comic-one that would be understood by everyone. I teamed up with accomplished cartoonist Lazar Bodroza and he started to illustrate my script ... but, soon, he stopped and our colaboraton failed ... -one year after that there was some comic workshop in my hometown and organizer asked me if i have some story to post it for collective drawing. I had a pile of 10 episodes scripts of "Robusto !!!" and I decided to post one of them for drawing. It was rather complicated to try to explain to the participants of the workshop what is going on in this serial and what they should draw, especially cause some of them actually never tried to draw comics before! ... The results were unexpectedly interesting and good, so i decided to hire as many amateurs and outsiders as possible to draw for this comic serial. Then I relaxed even more and started to make collages mostly from the pile of "Agricultural annual" which my mother gave me. Whole thing was becoming more and more funny and surreal and probably the top of wild freedom we gained was on the final workshop where one of the participants under the heavy influence continued to draw even after the lights were turned off!
He actually destroyed some of the posted pages so i had to post them again for new drawing ... but then I decided to include some of his crazy drawings made in complete darkness and it gave even greater fell of weirdness to our comic serial!

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Danilo Milosev Wostok