left available. So the Άνθρωπος –Αράχνη came
out in 1993 but it was a short-lived book, it only
lasted for one year (24 issues) and the really bad
news was that it took with it, into the abyss, the
more successful X-Men book. So that was the end
of Mammoth’s involvement with Marvel and mine
with Mammoth.
D999. Wonderful! I love a good story where the
talented guy gets the chick or in your case chicks in
the plural! I’m looking forward to seeing some of your
illustration work. Did that original Greek superhero
story ever get published anywhere?
By the late 80’s Mammoth received the license to do
some additional Marvel stuff while Kabanas still held
the Spider-Man rights. I have always found it odd
how competing publishers in foreign countries could
hold license rights to the same comic universes content. You would think in order to maintain a uniform
quality the Big 2 would limit the license to one publisher only per country, language, etc. Money talks I
guess, or screams for the licensing departments of
the Big 2.
You can definitely tell Mammoth put more effort in
reproducing the art and design in their books but
even with the better art direction it still seems like
the environment the comics were being released into
was pretty toxic as far sales go. Too bad really, but
like you stated earlier the Marvel material just didn’t
resonate, it seems, with the average comic reader
in Greece. Please correct me if I am misunderstanding, I’m generalizing here, but if you read comics in
Greece during the 70’s and 80’s you were either into
the adult/political/underground Babel material or
the more escapist simple story lines of a traditional
child’s comic. No wonder the Marvel Greek books
from this period seem so hard to source, they weren’t
really loved. I bet a lot of them ended up in trash bins.
So as a Marvel zombie took it upon yourself to
facilitate the translation of the Marvel content in order
to help bridge the cultural gap between the superhero
stories you loved and a wider Greek audience. “Wow”
is the first thing that comes to my mind. Passion can
and will drive us to do amazing things. The Mammoth/Kabanas guys were right in letting you into their
organizations. I’m telling you Vasilis, it is my humble
Page 12
opinion that you deserve some kind of tour of the
Marvel facilities and a meet and greet with some of
the guys at Marvel if not Stan the Man himself. This is
why I have become obsessed with the foreign side of
the comics world. The stories and people I am learning about deserve their time in the comic journalistic
sun.
With the many people you were involved with there
in the Greek comic industry, do you stay in contact
with any of them? Is there a journalistic avenue where
the stories of the Greek comic industry are heralded?
Now, I would be doing my readers a disservice if I
didn’t ask you to speak to the process of taking Marvel content and transforming it into a comic book that
sits on a Greek newsstand. Artwork and translation
process’s are very interesting, can you go into how
this worked a bit? Also, what were the average print
runs of Kabanas and also Mammoth books?
VC. You got that right Matt. Most Greeks at that
time period (70’s and 80’s) started reading comics
from the age of six, stopped reading them when
they got 12 to 14 years old at the most, and later
in their lives some of them were reintroduced to
comics at the age of 19-25 I guess via the Babel
material. The Marvel stuff wasn’t anywhere in
between except for the minds and hearts of a
few fanatics, like myself. I wa