
An international anthology of holy comics that won’t redeem you from reading! The recent rise in anxiety disorders has sparked a growing interest in spiritual themes, as people attempt to understand the rapid and seemingly aimless evolution of society. Can the world’s bestsellers—the holy books that have been reprinted for generations—still provide answers to the pressing questions of modern life? For millennia, humanity has turned to the written word to confront life’s most profound mysteries, often with limited success. Now, it is time for comics to tackle these issues, offering fresh perspectives and potentially more satisfying answers. In this spirit, ten international comic artists from eight countries have come together to create a new holy book—one that explores themes often absent from traditional sacred texts. Holyburger addresses the urgent questions of our time with an innovative and creative approach. Through comics infused with much-needed vitality, it examines topics such as gender equality, cloning, the fringes of evolution, sexual reproduction, rituals, and the purpose of earthly and cosmic existence—even exploring the nature of the universe before the Big Bang. The anthology features contributions from L.L. de Mars (FR), Matej Kocjan – Koco (SI), Anke Feuchtenberger (DE), Malcy Duff (SCT), Domen Finžgar (SI/SCT), Jorge Quien (AR), Jakob Klemenčič (SI), Rikke Villadsen (DK), Lukas Verstraete (BE), and Marcel Ruijters (NL). Together, they bring profound and timely themes to life with striking visual narratives, making Holyburger, the holy book of comics, a compelling read for anyone seeking insight into the questions that shape modern existence. Because in comics we trust. — Mednarodna antologija svetih stripov, ki vas ne bodo odrešili branja! Nenadni porast anksioznih motenj se med drugim manifestira v obilici spiritualnih vsebin, ki želijo osmisliti vedno bolj nagel in navidezno brezciljni razvoj družbe. So obstoječe svete knjige, svetovne knjižne uspešnice, ki jih vedno znova ponatiskujemo, še vedno zmožne odgovarjati na vprašanja sodobnosti? Tisočletja smo se najpomembnejših vprašanj o smislu življenja neuspešno lotevali z branjem pisane besede, zato je nastopil čas da, upajmo uspešnejše, na ta vprašanja odgovori deveta umetnost. Deseterica mednarodnih stripovskih avtoric in avtorjev iz osmih držav se je zato lotila stvarjenja nove knjige morale in postave, v katero so vključene tudi tiste teme, ki jih v obstoječih svetih tekstih ni mogoče najti. Holyburger, sveta knjiga stripa, tako na več kot 300 straneh prinaša odgovore na številna vprašanja, ki nas mučijo v sodobnosti. V novi sveti knjigi so tako zbrani stripi, ki s prepotrebno svežino in avtorskim pristopom obravnavajo vprašanja o enakosti spolov, kloniranju, stranpoteh evolucije in spolne reprodukcije, o ritualih, smiselnosti obstoja zemeljskega in nadzemeljskega, pa tudi o svetu pred velikim pokom. Da so vse naštete teme dobile likovno podobo, so s svojimi stripi poskrbeli L.L. de Mars (FR), Matej Kocjan – Koco (SI), Anke Feuchtenberger (DE), Malcy Duff (SCT), Domen Finžgar (SI/SCT), Jorge Quien (AR), Jakob Klemenčič (SI), Rikke Villadsen (DK), Lukas Verstraete (BE) in Marcel Ruijters (NL). Slava stripu!
Authors

Seúdonimo del artista visual, historietista y docente Jorge Opazo. Estudió Licenciatura en Bellas Artes y Comunicación Visual en Santiago de Chile. Ha participado en diversas exposiciones, publicaciones y becas en Latinoamérica, EEUU y Europa. Vive y trabaja en Buenos Aires.

Shortly before the Berlin Wall came down, Anke Feuchtenberger, Henning Wagenbreth, Holger Fickelscherer and Detlef Beck joined together to form a ‘Produktions-genossenschaft des Handwerks’ (production cooperative for handicrafts, PGH for short), called ‘Glühende Zukunft’, or ‘Glowing Future’. Their artistic activities in public spaces, such as graffiti and wall paintings, were motivated by creative actionism and were an expression of their political opposition. After the collapse of the Communist system, the individual artists in the East Berlin artists’ collective were very much in demand, particularly for their theatre posters, but also amongst book publishers and the print media for their illustrations. At the same time they were using their comic-like work to experiment with the visual forms of expression within the two different cultures and combining the aesthetics of East-European graphics and illustration with the Western narrative tradition of the comic. The PGH, along with the Renate Group, is one of the core groups of the German comic avant-garde, because the artists combine comic and art, illustration and picture-narrative without any inhibition, showing their work both at comic festivals and in galleries. In the first comics published by Anke Feuchtenberger, her drawings are dominated by angular contours, portraying characters and objects in hard lines. Their design is reminiscent of woodcut and linocut prints. The colouring is modest and restrained, with the individual areas being accentuated instead by opulent or minimal ornamentation. Feuchtenberger’s current works, however, appear more free and less hard, because she now draws with charcoal. On the coarse-grained paper, the lines become blurred, blending with the fine powder of the grey shades in the shadows and outlines. The trained commercial artist unites words and images to form a graphically united texture, with only an indirect connection to the narrative level. Anke Feuchtenberger usually works with the author Katrin de Vries. Together they develop stories and bring the images and the words into line with each other, as in Die kleine Dame (1997), Die Hure H (1996) and Die Hure H zieht ihre Bahnen (2003). Their enigmatic portrayals have a somnambulistic character, which is reflected in both the surreal motifs and in the cryptic combinations of words. Observers must fill in the space between image and text for themselves, in order to be able to unite the individual fragments. Sexuality and physicality are the central themes that Anke Feuchtenberger confronts in her comics. In Das Haus (2001), she divides the human body into thirty parts. In five to six pictures for each part, she reduces and condenses individual terms with the aid of metaphors and symbols. Instead of telling a story, Feuchtenberger creates visual and textual chains of associations, which initially appear to be separate from each other, but which achieve a profound or ambiguous expressive power when combined. Matthias Schneider, Goethe-Institut
