We did have comics in Romania. Not the American kind, not the Franco-Belgian bande dessinee kind. We had children comics with a series of local heroes and stories. Some of them were absolutely adorable. We also had adult comics with historical stories. Stories about Vlad the Impaler for instance, but the real historical figure, not the vampire in Bram Stoker’s book. The comics also featured other royal figures and important historical events. All very interesting. And rare, as any best selling item.
Nowadays, Romanian artists and writers cover the virgin territory of science fiction with heroes and super heroes, and comics featuring our own mythical heroes. Like Harap Alb (a regular man who manages to ally himself with all sorts of supernatural creatures in order to defeat evil) or Greuceanu (a shape shifter who fights all sorts of evils, some of them common to those in Western Europe folklore; others unique to Romania).
In the seventh grade, I was already into comics when Alin, my best friend from primary school, showed up in class with not one, but two French comics. It made quite an impression on everybody. Living in almost total isolation from the rest of the world, had left us with a thirst for everything foreign. It didn’t matter what it was as long as it came from outside our borders.
The first comics Alin showed us was a French comics magazine for children, “Pif Gadget”. It had several complete stories featuring different sets of characters and universes. And very important for a nine year old, it had a surprise gift included with each issue. It had been a wonderful revelation.
The second comics book was “Rahan”, a series of comics that started first as very short stories in Pif and then evolved into its own independent comics series. It’s the story of a smart and enterprising prehistoric man from the moment his father dies in a natural disaster and gives him his symbolic necklace. Rahan goes through so many adventures that it feels now as though he was immortal. It could be labeled these days as YA, but back then it was for everybody.
“Pif” started in 1942 under the name “Le Jeune Patriote”. It was published illegally by the French Communist Party under Nazi occupation. In 1945 it became legal and changed its name to “Vaillant, Le Jeune Patriote”. It published “to be continued” stories and gathered most of the important French artists and comics writers of that period.
But in 1969, changed its name and content. Still sponsored by the French Communist Party (yes, how else would it be sold in communist Romania!), it reached its maturity and changed into “Pif Gadget”, publishing only complete stories, changing half of the old franchises with new ones and introducing the surprise gift. It became so popular, that it gained international recognition and generated some spin offs such as “Yps” in Germany and “Jippo” in the Scandinavian countries. It sold over a million copies across Europe, Romania included.
Though, for me “Rahan” was the real deal: thirty pages of exotic prehistoric adventures, wonderfully drawn (my Canadian cartooning instructor didn’t quite agree on this, but “Rahan” still has a sort of magic hold for me, being my first comics collection). “Rahan” also had a centerfold full of science staff about dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals.
The only problem in 1978 was again supply and demand. This time I asked my mother to bribe the nice lady at the newsstand on our street corner, because it was more than I could afford. The lady explained to us that both comics come in such small numbers and the kids wanting them are so many that she couldn’t give them to us every week (or every month in Rahan’s case). She’d made a list of all the kids who’d bribed her and came to the conclusion that in order to satisfy us all, she could sell to me “Pif” once every 2 months and “Rahan” once every 3 months. My mother tried to raise the bribe level, but the nice lady explained that she would not deprive the other children of more issues for larger bribes. I had to accept it; there was no way around it—the nice bribed lady had some high moral grounds.
In 1982, my father was assigned in Greece to startup a Romanian-Greek maritime business. That was the year I travelled outside Romania for the first time (one of the very few people who could brag about such a thing, really).
Suffice to say that one of the first three issues of business was to look for comics. Obviously, the comics I found were in Greek, but that didn’t stop me from buying a lot of them, starting with an omnibus edition of “Tarzan” and going through “Star Wars”, “Captain America”, “Hulk”, “Spider Man” and many, many others. It was amazingly easy to understand the stories those images told when I couldn’t read the dialogue.
Later, in Canada, I met people who were as fanatical about comics as I was—or even more. In the beginning it was strange to tell them I’m a comics fan, because they had a thorough understanding of the American heroes and their stories, built up over decades of reading those comics and anyway, for them the only comics in the world are the American ones. While I read Romanian ones and as the American ones go, I didn’t have the same understanding and I didn’t know the entire line of heroes in the Marvel Comics universe or of the other houses. I couldn’t actually converse with them about the same passion we had.
I also realized that the American heroes in the Greek comics were different from their original versions. The Greek versions as I understood them portrayed different things. The characters were not always as good or invincible, or patriotic, as the American version.
I cannot share all this with my friends in Canada, or with anybody, really, since my experience was unique even for Romania; yet these European versions filled my childhood with the same joy as they did for children and teenagers here in North America.
After years of indecisions, I decided to preserve my memories as I made them, rather than change them with what the North American readers of American comics know to be true about them.
So now, I tell them that ‘yeah, while you were reading stories of “Spider Man” or “Superman”, I was reading stories of “Harap Alb” or “Vlad the Impaler” and sorry for not being there for your comics in the ‘70s or ‘80s, but neither were you there for my comics in those years. Romanians did and continue to have a comics culture. Not better, not more fulfilling. Just different.
(To be continued)