Magic in the gutter. A few words on comics and sequential art.

Until very recently, I had been making a conscious effort to separate writing, one of my favourite and most natural ways of expressions, from other areas of my artistic practice. I somehow felt that it was interfering with visual art, my official career path, and that it didn’t have a place in it, besides the “hobby” drawer.

But I have always been writing. When I was about 11 years old, I wrote poems and songs. Not long after that, I started keeping my journal (which I still do) and writing “novels”. I would spend summer afternoons with an old typewriter (alas, a 60s beige one, not the gorgeous black Continental machine) and type away, drinking coffee with a drop of sherry nicked from my parent’s cabinet, which I thought was terribly decadent. A few years later, when I was in high school, I wrote plays, monodramas, and adaptations of works by ancient Roman poets like Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid (mostly to avoid taking grammar exams in ancient Latin.) I wrote for a small cabaret I formed, and “on commission” for school events accompanying national holidays. I did some writing during my academic degrees. I adapted Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye into a script, and wrote BA and MA thesis. But even then I was very much discouraged from writing, not because of its quality (my pieces were usually chosen as exemplary ones) but because it was apparently distracting me from focusing on creating physical narratives.