Hello and welcome to my first blog post. I’ve been thinking about recording my personal experiences for a while now, but something always made me shy away from the idea. Perhaps it’s the obvious fact that the act of writing often seems to take oneself away from the lived experience. Or that it superimposes a layer of language onto something that is most often beyond words. Then again, the world is so full of things worth talking about, resonating with stories that hover under its surface. Also, I have a pretty bad memory and tend to forget the cool things I’ve done. This is partly an attempt to remember those things, partly an offer to share some of my experiences to anyone who cares to stop by. Welcome, whoever you are.
In May 2019, I travelled to Berlin to work for the wonderful German publisher Rotopol at the annual Comicinvasion festival. I had worked at some festivals before, but this was only the second one where I was responsible for the publisher table on my own. And so, on a clear Berlin morning, I found myself setting up a table at the fancy Museum für Kommunikation, arranging comics between imperial marbled columns underneath a bright dome.
After the first wave of visitors had passed, a tall young guy with a beard showed up, introduced himself as a fellow exhibitor at the festival and handed me the zine he was selling. It was a colorful comic, professionally printed with a distorted alien on the cover. We were talking for a bit when we noticed that we both lived in Bonn, a relatively small city in western Germany. It was a fun coincidence that repeated itself when we spotted each other on the bus on our way back home two days later. This guy with whom I would later become friends is Vasilis Dimopoulos, an amazing Greek cartoonist who has been diligently working on a Sci-Fi/Horror comic series called Barghal ever since I’ve met him.
Comics create connections. They brought me to the small town of Ludwigsburg where I had my first internship, all the way to Luzern, Switzerland where I sold books for Rotopol at the Fumetto Festival. I have spent considerable portions of my afternoon hauling boxes of signed books through central Hamburg and spent two night in a converted bunker in Switzerland, offered to exhibitors of a festival as a free sleeping place. From what I can tell, working as a publisher can be stressful at times, and I doubt I’ll ever have a lot of money. But also, I don’t want these experiences to stop.
If the Corona pandemic doesn’t cause a total lockdown in Europe, I will be heading to Berlin for another internship in a couple of weeks. With a semester in Paris on the horizon, 2020 is promising to become an exciting year and I hope to share some of my impressions (and book discoveries) here on this blog. Until then: happy reading and stay healthy.