German visual artist Dominik Heilig’s bizarre comic fantasy, “Kazka — The Black Ship,” which mixes space themes, manga-style art and Greek myth in one intriguing piece, is now on display at Zarya Bar.
The bar has put up more than half a dozen screen prints of frames from the comic, which tells the story of a boy who tries to put his girlfriend back together after she dies in a spaceship accident.
At least, that is part of it — for the comic is, even Heilig admits, often difficult to follow. He explains how he put it together by taking advice from a friend who said, “I should just draw a bunch of panels and put them together later — a story will appear by itself.”
The best approach to the comic is to read it as a dream, he said. “It is full of symbols and little myths that actually are waiting to be interpreted by the reader. I have about five interpretations myself of it,” Heilig said.
The 190-page, black-and-white comic was almost completely drawn on a tablet computer.
The comic appeared after Heilig worked with Artemy Lebedev’s design studio on an animation project for MTV. When that project fell though, Heilig used the work he had already done to create “Black Ship.”
Heilig is already working on a new comic project about migrants to Russia and the former Soviet Union and has started interviewing subjects.
Money from sales will go to pay for the translation into Russian of the classic graphic novel “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi about the life of a girl in Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution.
“Kazka — The Black Ship” runs till Oct. 20 at Zarya Bar, 3/10 Bersenevsky Pereulok, Bldg. 8. Metro Kropotkinskaya. Tel. 755-3424.?
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