The Four Color Media Monitor

The Edmonton Journal wrote about a Canadian artist of Slovenian descent who's developed a comic drawing from his ancestry set in the province of Alberta:

When local artist Adriean Koleric created his new comic book of track-suited antiheroes, he made sure to keep the story close to home.

Among several Edmonton nods within Koleric’s beautifully-printed, ongoing comic series Trakovi: The Slav with No Remorse sits Bellevue Community League, Victoria Fancy Sausage over in Montrose, and — with permission from the band’s living members — SNFU’s punk anthem, Misfortune, which soundtracks (in print, mind you) an exploding school bus on Highway 2A.

“The quick synopsis I’ve been giving people is it’s the story of a Slovenian immigrant doing contract work in the northern Alberta city of Edmonton,” explains the 46-year-old artist, a full-time estimator at an architectural metal shop in town.

Koleric, raised by his Slovenian grandparents in Delwood on the north side, came to his decision to feature our city prominently rather obliquely.

It sounds like a great idea, for a concept you rarely ever see creators in the USA doing. However, there's one part here that bugs me:

“I was reading an interview with Sarah Jessica Parker about Sex in the City,” he explains, “and she mentioned that New York was considered the fifth character. And what better place can I say I know something about than my hometown, right?

“People that live in Ritchie, or by Sugar & Spiced — all of a sudden they can get the feeling they just walked by where the story happened.”

This is honestly a shame he's citing SATC, if only because, as was revealed in the past month, one of the most prominent actors on the 1998-2004 series, Chris Noth, was accused of sexual assault, and years before, it turns out veteran supermodel Beverly Johnson had filed legal proceedings against him in the mid-90s for committing spousal assault. All the resulting scandal has since cost him his career, and this is why I don't think SATC makes a great choice for citation of where to draw ideas from for developing the graphic novel in question, now that it's tainted by Noth's past actions in real life.

Apart from that, however, Mr. Koleric's project is impressive, since it spotlights folks from backgrounds who rarely ever get serious focus in the USA comic industry's storytelling, whose contributors are far more obsessed with LGBT ideology and skin color on a superficial level than in exploring the wider globe outside the USA. Mr. Koleric's type of story is one far more worth telling when dealing with character drama focus.

Labels: Europe and Asia, indie publishers, msm propaganda