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FANZINE KRPELJ

What is the connection between the fat lady with the whip and the fanzine "Krpelj"?

In late 1993, with the help of "Vrsac Youth Center", the idea of ​​launching a fanzine was born, which under the patronage of the mentioned institution began to appear once a month and to publish the works of the author of the then local underground comic scene. In one of the comics I've been suggesting for the aforementioned release, the main heroine was just a fat lady with a whip from the title of this text. The then warden of the "Vrsac Youth Center", however, was making this very provocative and he was not ready to approve his release in the first number of fanzine "Patagonia". I was deeply frustrated by the fact that, in my life, there is some authority that, according to some of its aesthetic, moral, social or even just interesting archeology, takes the right to contemplate what I have created in the comic medium. When I realized that I would have the full freedom of expression to look for somewhere else, it was not long before I realized that this place in the city, and also the country in which I live, really does not ... So it was supposed to create such a place. In the fall of 1993, I launched the fanzin "Krpelj", which, according to what I wanted and intended, should be the sanctuary of freedom of thought and expression in the underground comics domain. The first issue of "Krpelj" was released at the time of the beginning of the catastrophic inflation in only 5 copies, but for the first time I had that pernicious feeling of complete freedom, independence, independence without any restrictions. Two years later, the fanatic "Patagonia" came out of the institution, moved to an alternative field magazine printed in 1000 copies published in its third issue and my "Dad with a whip" but I still did not give up on my own fanzine release . "Krpelj" later published not only comic books from Vršac, but also from other cities and also comic strips from other countries, but also entire alternative poems, novels, mixed-media projects and who knows what's not yet ... Then the fragments, and the entire numbers "Krpelj" are printed in many publications in the country and abroad. It could be said that one of many of my excessive conflicts with institutions was, in fact, one of the very same ultraconservative, provincial cultural systems, something that overwhelmed the limits of an ordinary fanzine devoted to the marginal forms of cultural creativity. It may sound pretentious and somewhat self-sacrificing, but after all these years I have the feeling that I was creating and persistently continuing to publish "Krpelj" made a big and important craze, hole or door through which all these marvelous, wonderful and original creations of the gifted darlings the margins created in the ghetto of underground culture that were completely ignored by all those cultural workers who know what is called "Real Culture". I believe that "Krpelj", with all its flaws, overtraining, chaoticness, anarchoism, etc., is yet proof that true creativity is only where there is room to allow human beings to truly be as true as they are!

Wostok, Vršac 19th November 2007.

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