I will wait for your response on the political situation, I find it intriguing that there could be some
consequences of American foreign policy having
some effect on the acceptance of American licensed
material.
VC. Well, as for the political issue… it is a fact
that anti-Americanism in Greece has its roots in
those junta days where freedom, on any level,
was canceled and the nation paid severely after
the Turkish invasion with thousands of Cypriot
refugees fleeing in the southhern part of the
island and the motherland Greece. The poor
sales of Kabanas’ Marvels though happened exclusively because the material was way beyond
the standards of the common comics reader of
those days, primary school kids. If the publisher
aimed from the start at a more adult audience
and had some respect for it maybe the result
would have been different. In 1981 though
Along with translating Vasilis is also an illustrator.
This illustration was published in 2006 for a
magazine called “Rock the War”.
another magazine started its run in Greece, a
magazine created specifically for adults. It was
called Babel and collected material only from
politically driven European magazines like the
Italian Linus and Frigidaire or the French HaraKiri and a couple of underground American
creations. It wasn’t the first of its kind but it was
the most consistent with great respect for their
readers, good to perfect translations and a very
innovative art department. It also presented
some of the greatest European comics of all
time. But that great magazine carried an equally
great flaw: it hated, as was to be expected, the
American mainstream comics, especially the
superhero comics. So, in the following years, a
strange theory was adopted through fragments
of many articles that were hosted inside the
magazine and in the minds of some of the Greek
comic artists that published their work there. A
theory, that even I, who had collected all of the
Babel issues had never thought possible that
anyone could believe in, that I’ ll try to describe
with a few words:
“The superhero mythology was created in the
shadow of Nietzsche’s superman theory, a theory that had fascist and racist characteristics al