How the " Luna " was created

In the mid-eighties, I came up with an anthology of the "Croatian post-war band" that was full of great works by Andrew Maurović, Otto Reisinger, "New Squadrer" and many others, but my attention was most attracted to Walter I Norbert Neugebauer's "First Men on the Moon" based on the template of the same novel HG Wells. The visual style created by Walter Neugebauer in this comic strips is characterized by strong contrasts of black and white and suggestive, unusual atmosphere created by the unusual, almost "ghostly" lightening that begins to appear when the main heroes lie down at the Moon and present to the end of this unusual visual stories. Although this comic was created in the early 1950s, the powerful and intense impression left on the reader suggested that the comic was nothing short of its wit and the actuality, and that it was a true masterpiece of the ninth art that never outdated and actually lived. its intense life in one's own, apartheid dimension.
The whole decade later, while in Serbia the "stormy transition" from socialist to capitalist social and economic system lasted, accompanied by "incidental" phenomena such as wars, hyperinflation, demonstration, isolation, etc, made me go back to rewriting the comic " The first people on the Moon ". Is my situation in our country in 1993 - a hyperinflation that has devalued all the values, the hills, the empty raps in the works, the streets that could only be seen when passing by with a sad and worrying expression on the face, all in all a strong impression that everything that was termed "normal" life completely disappears and gives way to a strange haze in the vacuum of a completely uncertain existence and a screaming hopelessness - caused me to correlate with my own existential situation in the re-discovery of the visionary comics of the Neugebauer brothers?
In agreement with Grabowsky, I'm writing a synopsis for a kind of remake of our favorite comic book and it's a story that could last for a whole 150 or more pages! Then on Grabowski's stage, which first tells the story of four chapters, he draws away all the segments of the story that seemed to be essential, and in his visual setting extends and highlights some parts that seemed irrelevant, such as wandering and tumbling down the corridors in the underground lilies of the moon. Then he casts the bulk of the text and the dialogue and thus creates a certain "deaf" atmosphere that reminds German expressionist films of the 1920s.
Our most ambitious project "Luna" we really drew and wrote both, as if we were one author, completely creative and almost functioned as two hemispheres of the same brain! Grabowski placed the bulk of the table in a pencil at his nightclub guard. In fact, he was drawing only sometime in a period of 2 or 3 to 6 in the morning, when all the friends, acquaintances, and prisoners who came back to talk with him were always ready to listen to everyone and to help. I hope it came to me one day and made 3 tables set in detail in the pencils he drew for some 4 o'clock the previous night! The speed with which he worked the drawings is that Grabowski is a visual visionary rather than a writer who pedantically draws his drawings! I can say that this is also a comic book that I’ve definitely found in my heavy black graphics. It is easy to see that the first sheet has much more sensation and shrinkage than the final one, and between them evolutionary process took place, in which I draw grabowsky more and more to the black silhouettes of a black shower with the subsequent casting of the temper which was supposed to spell the cold, the glittering light of the planet Luna. Somehow, this "cold" light of the planet Luna has become the crazy main hero of the whole story, the mysterious "something" that made this book "different" not just in relation to most other SF comics but also in our own opus. I often wondered if I might, with my shower intervention, ruin an excellent sketch and a brilliant template and a great graphic effort by Grabowsky transforming them into a pile of black masses, but Grabowsky would, in general, really liked me and encouraged me in such a work. He felt that by such "subtraction" our visual style only gets the intensity of expression!
When he first read the final version of the "Luna" comic, Alexander Zograf told me roughly: "This is really impressive! I read a long, long strip of" The First People on the Moon "and I get it somehow, like through the fog. What is the relationship between your comics and originals? "I answered something like that:" Well, how to formulate it ... It's like you first read the "First Men on the Month" page, then full of deep imprints go to sleep And then you dream the whole story again. Well, that dream, that's "Luna"! "
East