Addendum 2014

by Ulli Lust 

(Please excuse my poor english)

I am not a happy traveler. Nowadays I prefer to stay at home near my drawing table. Sounds boring, sorry. 

But - could I reject an invitation to a Comics Festival in Columbia? I did it before,  twice, still the direktor of Entrevinetas, Daniel Jiménez Quiroz was persistent enough to ask a third time, and  a fortune teller in Berlin told me, that this trip will be like a party, like a big intoxication. So I finally flew to Bogota end of September, two days later to Medellin, for lectures, panel discussions and hanging out with other comics artists. The festival was really like a big party, surprisingly only intoxicated by exhaust fumes of the crazy traffic in these two cities. 

Me, Kelly Moctezuma, Ben Newman, Laura Acosta

Marco Tóxico, Javier Bolivar, Laura Andrea Garzón;
Half an hour before, Laura Acosta brought Javier to me, speaking:"Javier is a winner. He won our  junior competition in Bogota." "Congratulations!", I said," what did you win?" He smiled shyly, probably because his english was bad. Lauras answer revealed: "He won one hour with you." 
I made, "Oh". We decided to go eating all together.

Marco Tóxico, Riccardo Rodrigez, Daniel Jiménez Quiroz, Pablo Guerra, El Tio Berni, Edmond Baudoin, Jim Stoten, Manuele Fior, Bef, Martin El Alegre, Ben Newman, Ana Merino, Berliac, Laura Acosta, Sam Alden, Frank Santoro, Fernando Boltrón, Olivier Schrauwen, Jonathan D. Morven, Ulli Lust, Santiago Orozco Duque;


Our flights back to Berlin were canceled thanks to the Air France pilot strike, Olivier Schrauwen and me got new connections, which enlarged the travel duration from 20 to 48 hours. And we had to wait for a connection flight in New York for a whole day!
Wait a moment,  a day in New York? That didn't sound so bad. I wrote a mail to our friend Bill Kartalopoulos, if he might find time for a coffee together. At first, Olivier and me strolled  through Soho, started with the coffee, because we  didn't sleep since 24 hours, and looked for an internet cafe. Olivier had heard something about a Richard McGuire exhibition, and that he had made a new book. We are both big fans of his work. We didn't even find a book shop.
But we got a SMS by Bill, who wrote: "I made some possible appointments for you. We can go to the New York Times and then have lunch with the art director Olivier knows, Alexandra Zsigmond. Then we can preview Richard McGuire's exhibiton, which opens on Thursday. After that we may be able to meet Art Spiegelman for a coffee.

And that was exactly, what happend on our day in New York, except we drank red wine in Art Spiegelmans studio.
Intoxicating!

Olivier Schrauwen, Bill Kartalopoulos

Olivier Schrauwen, Alexandra Zsigmond, me; the background is part of Alexandras work space and shows illustrations from around the world. I found several drawings by german colleagues, like Sophia Martinek, Atak, Henning Wagenbreth ... 

Richard McGuires exhibition wasn't open yet, there were still tools standing arround,  in the air the penetrating smell of fresh colour. I looked at the images and felt high immedeately. 

"Here" was a 36-panel comic published in Raw volume 2 #1 in 1989. Built in six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it collapsed time and space to tell the story of the corner of a room - and its inhabitants - between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2033 AD. Now Richard Mc Guire had enlarged the concept to a book-lenght version, and the exhibition in the Morgan Library showed excerpts of the working prozess. The book itself wasn't delivered yet. 

Happy me, Joel Smith (curator of the show) and Olivier Schrauwen.
After that, we went to Art Spiegelmans studio and on his table - miraculously - was a copy of THE book, which excerpts we had just seen before. Art Spiegelman had gotten an advance copy, being asked to talk about it in an interview. 

Thousand thanks to Bill Kartalopoulos, who turned this day into one of the great moments of my life.  "Hier" was released in Germany by Dumont Verlag.