 Having engaged several authors to work concurrently on this comic serial, the publisher was able to speed the publishing date of individual albums. The complete serial was published within a period of two years instead of the seven years that a similar serial would have taken to be issued in France. This pseudo-historical saga, a blend of fantasy and familiar world history, deals with mystic wars and modern theories of conspiracy. Four comic draftsmen from the former Yugoslavia contributed to the complete project. The first two albums Génése (Genesis) and Le château des djinns (The Castle of Giants) were done by Igor Kordej, the third album Le Graal de Montségur by the tandem Goran Sudžuka and Boban Savić Geto, while the fourth and fifth Les Clés de Saint Pierre and 1666 by Leo Pilipović, a comic artist from Subotica. For the next installment of the serial, which has achieved remarkable success and is still is being issued in France, Igor Kordej has been engaged again.
All four comic artists are known to the local comic-book-reading public and represent several generations of comic authors.
A comic veteran from the former Yugoslavia, Igor Kordej, who was an honourary guest at last year’s fifth consecutive Salon of Comics in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SCC), is the most prolific comic author from the former Yugoslavia. He was born in Zagreb (Croatia) and published his first works in the youth weekly Polet in 1977, as the youngest member of the innovative comic group "Novi Kvadrat" (New Square). As a permanently engaged draftsman by Novi Sad’s publishing house Marketprint for its magazine Stripoteka, Kordej published the comic strip Vam and the Children of Vam from 1983 to 1986 that, after becoming a cult comic, attracted the attention of French publisher Les Humanoïdes Associés from France, which published the Saga of Vam in three albums (1988 – 1989).
After leaving Yugoslavia, he eventually moved to the United States where he was engaged by leading publishers Marvel and DC, and in the 1990s and turn of the millennium he worked on the comics New X-Men, Extreme X Men, Cable (Marvel) and also Star Trek – the Gorn Crisis (DC). He worked on comics written after the film scripts of Star Wars/ Protocol Offensive, Star Wars/ Chewbacca and also Tarzan: Carson of Venus and Tarzan: Rivers of Blood, all for the independent comic publisher Dark Horse. For the publishing house IDW he worked on the Sci-Fi (SF) comic Smoke, for which he was nominated for the Will Eisner Prize. Igor Kordej also does illustrations and cover designs for SF and fantasy books, and he dedicated a large part of his time at the SCC showcase lecturing on solutions for graphic design in cooperation with writers and publishing houses. Since last year, Marvel’s Cable (nos. from 97 – 100) has been available in local comic shops, in an edition of Croatian publishers Bookglobe. It is evident that Kordej did this work speedily, probably due to short time constraints, but in introducing for Marvel an atypical style, he has managed to preserve all the necessary symbolism and the precise anatomy of characters. Kordej did Cable according to a script by David Tischman, who is well known for his horror comics Trailer Park of Trailer Park of and for visualisation of the film Aeon Flux, an MTV production.
Fantasy becomes reality: the Serbian author from Niš, Boban Savić Geto, penciled comics using uncommon painting techniques that resulted in perhaps the most beautiful and most imaginative comic tables in the Secret History. Known as a book and magazine illustrator, who literally turns fantasy into reality in his pictures, his tables, describing the entrance of medieval troops into the Holy Wood, stands out in its style from the rest of the serial.
Boban Savić Geto was born in 1972, in Aleksinac. He spent his childhood in Niš and eventualy moved to Belgrade. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Department of Painting, and holds a master’s degree in illustration from the Belgrade Faculty of Applied Arts. He does book illustrations and publishes in the weekly Politikin Zabavnik. His illustrations have twice been published in the distinguished American yearbook dedicated to illustration – Spectrum. He has published comics in magazines Tron, Strip Manija, and Bager… Over the last two years, in cooperation with Uroš Stojanović and scriptwriter Luc Besson, Geto was the art director for the film Charleston for Ognjenka. This job included creating storyboards and cooperating with a large number of young digital artists who were engaged on the final visualisation of film scenes, including visual effects with the special animation techniques.
 Y – The last man: Goran Sudžuka, a Croatian author, was born in 1969, in Zagreb. After finishing the School of Applied Art in 1988, he published his first and began working on animated films. The larger part of the work he has created for domestic publishers has been done in cooperation with Darko Macan. He penciled the teenager love comics Svebor and Plamena, according to Macan’s scripts, for which Sudžuka received the 1997 award for the Best Realistic Comics in Croatia. For American DC comics, in cooperation with scriptwriter Jamie Delan, he created the comic-serial Outlaw Nation that brought him the prestigious Russ Manning Prize after two years of work, which is awarded every year for the best new draftsman. For the same publisher he completed a four-part series Hellblazer Special: Lady Johanna Constantine (script: Andy Diggle). After a short pause, as is customary on the American market, Goran joined the team of draftsmen engaged on the popular and appraised serial Y – the Last Man (script: Brian K. Vaughan).
Punker in the world of comics: It is interesting that the Serbian draftsman from Subotica, Leonid Pilipović, was a member of the alternative punk band from Subotica ("Goblins" and "Džukele") and at the same time he drew comics and created album covers for his and other domestic rock bands. Pilipović is engaged on drawing two albums of Secret History, the serial that proves that for the art of comics there are no boundaries.
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