Το Σερβικό περιοδικό κόμικς Strip Pressing, στο 24ο τεύχος του (Δεκέμβριος 2023), φιλοξένησε μία συνέντευξή μου στον Eduard Pandele. Η συνέντευξη δημοσιεύτηκε στα σερβικά, αλλά πραγματοποιήθηκε στα αγγλικά. Ακολουθεί το αγγλικό κείμενο.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Tasos Zafiriadis was born in 1981 in Thessaloniki, Greece. He started publishing comic strips in 2002, and contributed to dozens of albums and fanzines over the years. He is one of the founders of “The Very Closed Circle”, a collective comic-strip blog. He has received the Best Greek Writer Comicdom Award in 2011 and 2012. In real life, he has a Ph. D. in Orthodontics and he’s not forcing his patients to read his comics. 🙂
He wrote and drew ”The amazing adventures of Spiff and Spaff” (Futura, 2005; 2nd ed. Jemma Press, 2012), “Mr. Kong & other stories” (Enati Diastasi, 2007), “Skorpochori” (Enati Diastasi, 2015). He wrote “Intra Muros” (with Petros Christoulias – Eleftherotypia, 2010), “It’s not what you think” (with Loukas Tsouknidas & Panagiotis Pantazis – Jemma Press, 2011), “Arachova” (with Panagiotis Pantazis – Enati Diastasi, 2011), “The corpse” (with Yannis Palavos & Athanassios Petrou – Jemma Press, 2011), “Slap” (with Petros Christoulias – Jemma Press, 2014), “Trenches – Stories for Gangrene Alley” (with Petros Christoulias – Jemma Press, 2014), “Gra-Gru” (with Yannis Palavos & Athanassios Petrou – Ikaros, 2017) and “Mosaic” (with Petros Christoulias – Jemma Press, 2019) .
How did you discover comics? Were there any available while you grew up? Is there a “mainstream” comics market in Greece?
Greece had a comics market for a long time, but it became more self-aware, or rather became a comics market instead of a “pulpy” books / magazines market during the late ‘70s- early ‘80s. That was when some magazines started printing comics from Europe and all over the world, and essentially started educating the public in the “language” of comics and the variety of forms they can take. The big “bloom” of the Greek comics scene happened in 2000 with the “9” comics magazine, which for a whole decade was (essentially for the first time) paying Greek artists to publish their comics. Then the crisis came, and things got harder. Yet, a lot of comic books are still being translated, mainly Disney and other commercial works, and also a lot of Greek comics are being produced and published, of increasing quality and variety.
I think my first comic was probably a Disney book, but what I distinctly remember is the first issue of the Greek magazine “COMIX” (ΚΟΜΙΞ) in July of 1988, that started printing Carl Barks and Don Rosa’s duck stories. The quality was evident even for my 7-year-old eyes. I think I owe a lot to this “encounter”. Later I began reading a lot of strips like Peanuts or Garfield, and discovered Goscinny as well. Then gradually I started to delve into the great, more “adult” artists like Hugo Pratt or Moebius.
Do you have any favorite comic writers? Care to share them with our readers?
Many names come to mind: Carl Barks, Don Rosa, George Herriman, Goscinny, Hugo Pratt, Moebius, Tony Millionaire, Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, Guy Delisle, Emmanuel Guibert, Seth, Chris Ware and many more… I was also influenced by Max Andersson, I copied his style a lot. I also like a lot of Greek writers (and friends), but I must specifically mention Giorgos Tsoukis, who was also a big influence.
Greece isn’t well known for comics, and yet there must be some great creators out there. Who should I search for in bookstores during my next summer holiday?
This is a tough question, because many are friends and collaborators, but you’ll have a lot of books to check, as there are more and more great comics published in Greece, with a great variety of styles and stories. You can look out for Petros Christoulias, Tomek Giovanis, Thanasis Petrou, Stavros Kioutsioukis, Tasmar, Dimitris Kamenos, Efi Theodoropoulou, Kanellos Cob, Stella Stergiou, Georgia Zachari, Giorgos Gousis, Panagiotis Pantazis, Alexia Othonaiou, Christos Stampoulis, Yannis Rubulias and many many more who will probably hate me for not mentioning them… 🙂 Moreover, Alekos Papadatos, Abraham Kawa, Ilias Kyriazis, Michael Dialynas, DaNi and others were also translated into English and published abroad.
How did this project begin? Did you already know all the other contributors to “The Very Closed Circle” from the start or did each of you join gradually, as the blog became better known?
It started as an idea by my good friend Tomek Giovanis back in 2010, as a way to experiment in the comics medium with the imposed constraint of a standard format: only four frames per strip. At first there were only 4 of us in “The Very Closed Circle”, as we called the team blog. Soon more members were allowed in, as long as we thought that there was a common esthetic. A lot of it was based on experimentation, inside jokes based on other members’ strips etc.
The blog lasted for 4 years, when we thought that it… closed its circle (greek expression for “ran its course”!). In the end there were 500 strips from 18 artists. All the strips can still be found at http://theveryclosedcircle.blogspot.com with an english translation for the non-greek speaking readers. After that, in 2016 we did an anthology with new strips, along with an exposition in Athens, that was developed in a similar way to the blog: in waves, with deadlines for each strip, so that we could see what everyone else was doing and use their material as inspiration for the next ones.
I assume the “Skorpohori” album was one of the ways the blog reached its “life goal”. What happened to your “scattered village”’s inhabitants afterwards?
We tried at some point to publish all the strips in a large volume, but 500 pages was an expensive task no publisher would undertake in Greece. So, everyone was free to use their material as they wished. I’d done 118 strips for The Very Closed Circle, so I decided to use all of them for “Skorpohori”. I am a completist, I didn’t want to leave anything out. “Skorpohori” means “scattered village” in Greek, in other words “helter skelter” or “a mess”. The title refers to the mix-n-match nature of the material, some in color, some black and white, along with guest strips of other members that I used as reference or that responded to my work. I even included notes with “making of” trivia or readers’ comments, to try and capture the feeling of the atmosphere as it was originally uploaded in the blog. Besides “Skorpohori”, Stavros Kioutsioukis used his material to publish a strip anthology, titled “Tits”!
“Art is that kind of egoism you try to share with others.” And yet, are you just a normal egoist or one with a purpose?
Well, egoism, I guess, is the default factory setting, so we should try to go past that! 🙂 There is egoism in making art, but art is also about sharing with people, about communication, and infinitely about being loved.
THE CORPSE
The Corpse is a very simple story… with two writers. How did you divide up your assignments? Was there anything unusual about this album’s creative process?
Well, the script was based on a true story that happened in Thessaloniki. I mixed it up with another true story from the building I lived in Athens at the time, where the septuagenarian administrator stole the money from the common expenses and asked me to buy lottery tickets for him hoping to get the money back.
Halfway through the writing, I ran into a dead end, as the plot I had in mind for the comic didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. So, I asked my friend Giannis Palavos, who is a writer (awarded later with the National Book Award for his short stories), to finish it if he could, as the atmosphere was close to the work he was doing at that time. He did, and we edited it a lot to ensure the coherence of the writing style.
Everybody smokes in The Corpse. Is it the same in the real Greece, not just the paper one?
Unfortunately, Greece has indeed among the highest percentages of smokers in the E.U., although numbers are declining lately. I am a non-smoker, and this is torture for me. Fortunately, after many unsuccessful attempts, a new anti-smoking regulation passed in 2019 and the situation improved greatly in public spaces, cafes etc.
I like the subtle social critique you’ve inserted into The Corpse. The main character’s grievances build up little by little, his rebellion eventually turning into the mute rage that propels him to the surprise-not-too-surprise ending. And yet, why the sea and not the mountain or some ordinary landfill?
Well, Yannis wrote the actual ending, so you should ask him! However, I think the answer lies in the city itself – Thessaloniki. The seafront is a “trademark” of the city, and provides a powerful imagery (since comics is a visual medium!). As most of the plot takes place either in an apartment or in the mountain above the city, the ending had to happen in a more “liberating” location. On a side note, you’ll notice that we also tried to avoid the famous landmarks of the city, like the White Tower. 🙂
MOSAIC
Mosaic is your most recent album, and despite its medieval theme, it has a surprisingly personal genesis. Can you briefly recount it for our readers?
In 1923, during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, my grandparents moved from Messini of Eastern Thrace to their new homeland, Greece, and settled in Agios Athanasios of Thessaloniki. Among the few things they carried with them were nine tesserae from an old mosaic. My father remembers them saying that during a powerful rain, these shiny stones emerged from the dirt around the ruins of a Byzantine fortress. Was there an old church there? What icon did these tesserae form? In my eyes, this family heirloom had a magical quality further enhanced by its mysterious origins. Years later, following the completion of this book, I found out that this was the place where the Roman city of Drizipara laid, with the Basilica of the Martyr of St. Alexander of Rome, which was completely destroyed by the Avars in 591 AD. Did the stones come from this church or a more recent one? Although I obviously have no idea, you can guess which version I prefer! The city, which was subsequently named Messini after the 9th century, was conquered in the 14th century by Murad I and, in 1453, the wife of the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras died there as a slave after the Fall of Constantinople. Today it is the obscure village of Misinli in Turkey. So, I had this “magic” in mind when I first visited the place in 2002. Two adzes purchased by my father from a street vendor during our visit there certainly played their role, too. The image of the peasant-turned-to-warrior imposed itself early in the plot formation.
There is a relentless logic in the structure chosen for this album, despite the increased “difficulty” of the reading. Was this structure an immediate choice, or something that evolved over time alongside the script?
Well, if the tesserae were the seeds of the myth, they were “watered” by the writings of one of my favorite writers, Milorad Pavić from Serbia. “The Dictionary of the Khazars”, probably my favorite book of all time, distinguishes itself by this – part Balkan, part Byzantine – mixture of fantasy and history, whose proximity to Greek reality made it seem to me even more indecipherable and fascinating. Another important and innovative element of his works is the non-linear reading pattern encouraged by the author.
The story of “Mosaic” began to take shape as I observed the “plucked” eyes on the faces of saints in the old churches, vandalized by either unbelievers or overzealous believers, who were removing paint as a talisman to cure eye diseases. Each chapter would be a tessera with a different tint. Together they would form a mosaic story, urging the reader to put order into a fragmented plot. So, the idea was there before I’d even written a word!
Many of the sequences depicted in Mosaic seem to be reflections of real events. How important is real history to this fantasy fable?
As the thousand years of the Empire were rather mixed in my mind, a new circle of investigations began to try and give a Byzantine aroma to the story – although I ended up borrowing from many other places and eras: superstitions, such as those about the falling stars being a bad sign. Customs of burial. An early Byzantine version of onion soup with bread. Venice as the opposing force, the fatal Fourth Crusade, and the Black Death of the 14th century. The mythical Djinn and the Ifrit of the Arabs. The bronze gates between the mountains known as Breasts of the North, built by Alexander the Great to keep the uncivilized barbarian nations of the north out of the world south, as we learn in the Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes. The Roman Bridge of Septimius Severus in Euphrates, upon which byzantine folk hero Digenes Akritas is said to have built his tomb according to the eponymous epic poem, as well as the “marble threshing floors” of the more recent acritic folk songs. The “Platytera” Icon of Our Lady of the Sign. Saint Sisoës the Great, who in post-Byzantine depictions mourns in front of the relic of Alexander the Great: Ah, ah, Death, who can flee from you? The inevitable Fall of Constantinople. And much more…
But let’s not be mistaken: this book is definitely not a historical novel! It remains a fantasy story, even if there have been fewer freedoms taken.
Is there a story behind the creation of this darkly humorous series? Why World War One, for example?
Well, the Salonica (or Macedonian) front would be the obvious choice for someone living in Thessaloniki. However, the Western front has powerful imagery, so Petros Christoulias (the artist) and I decided it would be an ideal setting for humorous comic strips. It all started when I read that women sent sweets to poet Guillaume Apollinaire by mail, when he was in the trenches. A little while afterwards, I did my army service, which is obligatory in Greece, and all this weird and paranoid set of rules, situations, and information about guns, drills, army jargon etc. flooded my brain! In a way, it unlocked a way in my mind that this could be written, since before that I didn’t understand the way the army worked, which is more or less the same in either peace or war: war is just extra work for the soldiers, really! I found the idea funny, and I also had a lot of experiences there that made me laugh because of the absurdity and ineptness of both soldiers and officers, so there was a basis for the strip even before I delved into WWI specifics. So, then I started reading books and watching films and documentaries about the Great War, focusing mainly on the soldiers’ experiences, not on specific battles, so any soldiers’ experiences would be relevant, really, not only the French ones’. By researching I found more and more actual absurd situations or fun facts so after a while I didn’t have to invent anything.
With very few exceptions, each of the page-length strips features a different bunch of soldiers. Were you afraid to create specific personalities because you felt you had to kill them off at some point?
Well, it probably came from reality – in the army, people come and go, you forget some names, you get moved to another town and meet new people…. Of course, in the Great War, so many people were killed and replaced before you even got to know their name, probably. For the strip, it was a deliberate choice from the beginning, an anonymous bunch of people that find themselves in absurd trouble all the time, so the real protagonist is the situation itself. I imagined it as “Asterix”, but only with Roman legionaries as main characters – we never know their names, but we laugh anyway. So, some characters keep showing up, like the doctor or two of the lower ranking officers, as the inevitable mediators of authority. We see the generals only twice, and in a distance, never on the frontlines. Another choice was to never actually show the Germans up close, as probably most of the French soldiers didn’t really see them anyway, and besides, most soldiers there never knew what this war was about.
All of your albums feature history, one way or another. Can you share your favorite historical graphic novels with our readers?
Apart from Spiegelman’s famous “Maus” and most works by Joe Sacco, I’d say “The photographer” and “Alan’s War” by Emmanuel Guibert and, last but not least, also a Greek one: “Democracy” by Kawa and Papadatos.
On this topic, my latest work “God brought the dawn”, drawn by Thanassis Petrou, just got published in Greece – and it’s a historical graphic novel based on my grandfather’s real account of his experiences in the Greek-Italian war on the Albanian front.
THE CRAFT
What’s your usual comic crafting method? Do you do storyboards as you go, or do you write the plot first?
It depends on the type of project, the collaborator and the time I have when it happens!
Usually for the weekly strips the script I send has the detailed page structure with scene descriptions, as the amount of work is smaller and more manageable. For larger projects (one shot albums) I usually write everything, including breaking down the frames to convey the rhythm of the story, but I leave the details on page layout for later so that it won’t slow me down. Depending on the collaborator, we either do the page breakdown and layouts together or the artist does it and I check it if there is something that I envisioned differently. Some artists prefer to do it themselves. For example, with “Mosaic” I had no time at all due to an overloaded work year, and Petros did all the page and frame layouts, with only small details changing afterwards.
Do you write stories with specific artists in mind? Who would you love to illustrate your next story?
Mostly, I’d say yes. But plans do change, because artists abandon projects sometimes, and creation takes longer. For example, the artist linked to “Mosaic” changed three times, and it took nine years from the first script to the printed book. My next project to be produced is a metaphysical noir story in Thessaloniki in the ‘50s, co-written with Abraham Kawa, and it will be drawn by Raphaella Koni. Another project that I am working on is a historical one (again), and it will be drawn by Thanasis Petrou, a long time collaborator, when I’ll actually find time to finish it. After that, who knows? Maybe something with Petros Christoulias again, we haven’t worked together in a while.
You write and draw, too. Yet, your most recent books are collaborations. Did you give up drawing for good?
Before 2005 I thought that I alone can actually draw what I think. But then I started my post-graduate program in orthodontics, and since then my free time vanished almost completely, as I continued to a Ph. D. So, when a proposal came in 2007 from the “9” comics magazine (it no longer exists, sadly), I started a collaboration with Petros Christoulias, because otherwise I would lose the chance to publish in a magazine distributed in the newsstands of the whole Greece. As time passed by, I started writing more freely things that I probably couldn’t draw anyway. There are pros and cons with collaborations, of course, but I really don’t have much of a choice, since my day job is being an orthodontist. I am not drawing much these days, but I am doing some work, slowly, as ideas come, with no external pressure. I revived two of my first characters in 2021 and started drawing some strips again. Covid symptoms? 🙂 Who knows… Μaybe they will be published at some point, I hope…
