The Comics Museum
The Comics Museum is a project started by artist Alexandru Ciubotaru on June 16th 2011 as a physical space.
România Internațional, 05.01.2014, 12:13
The project enjoyed support from the National Contemporary Art Museum, the Romanian Cultural Institute, the European Union of National Cultural Institutes, the Belgian Comic Book Center, and the Comic Book Association of Romania. The museum initially opened on the fourth floor of the National Contemporary Art Museum in Bucharest. It had two exhibition spaces, a library and projection room, and a workshop and debate area. They organized a number of conferences on images parallel to comic books (caricature, animation, book illustrations), debates, by writers and editors, creation workshop, live drawing sessions, book launches, film screenings, and concerts.
Alexandru Ciubotaru explains his passion for comic books and a permanent museum dedicated to this form of art: “I graduated from an art high school, where I was discouraged all the time to read or draw comic books, it was considered infantile, something aimed exclusively at children, but I realized that wasn’t the case. Comic books have topics for all ages and tastes, and it is easily accessible for everyone. It is a form of art in itself, which is worth discovering. I am trying to set up exhibitions, create albums, set up meetings with authors and workshops around comic books, and I hope at some point, 15 to 20 years from now, to have a dedicated museum. Now we go through a period of assimilation, because there are a lot of things to discover, a lot of things to be gathered, which at some point may take over the wing of a museum.”
Four months after being hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum, the Comic Book Museum turned into an itinerant museum. It continued through events, presentations, collaborations and exhibitions proper, by album publishing, or by simply promoting comic book events on a dedicated website. Right now before May 2014, you can visit the Art of Comic Books exhibition at the Bucharest National Library, whose purpose is to explain how comic books evolved over more than a century in Romania, using examples of creation by over 70 authors.
Alexandru Ciubotaru wrote on the website: “Our project is now in a place that is best suited for spatial metamorphosis: the Bucharest National Library. The exhibition we propose tries to present to the public, for specialists and amateurs, the various sides of this so-called 9th art, comic books”.
Alexandru Ciubotaru: “I tried to bring something more to the exhibition, in the sense that it shows us what the so-called kitchen of a comic book artist looks like, showing that it is not infantile art, as they told me in high school, it is extremely laborious work, based on a screenplay, or the adaptation of a story. You have to know teleplay, you have to know anatomy, you have to know visual narration. You also have to have minimal knowledge of printing, and all these influence the art of illustration. You can discover all these things there, and this laboratory can be a surprise for both expert and amateur public, designed by a single person in order to give birth to a comic book.”
Along the years, Romanian comics books and strips went from simple humor to militant education and culture to ideological and doctrinal militancy during the communist years. It then reverted to freedom of expression, after the 1990s. in Romania there is a single professional magazine dedicated to comic books called “Harap Alb continues…”, referring to one of the best known Romanian fairy tales, about a legendary hero. In the magazine introduction, the creators write: “We want to show how our superhero evolved in the imagination of our artists, in over a century of history. Harap Alb is nothing short of American superheroes. It is just that he has been slumbering for too long. It is time he woke up. Harap Alb continues! He reinvents himself, he lives in the present, illustrated in Marvel/ DC Comics style, in an attempt to provide young people nowadays with the sense of adventure offered by the stories written by Romanian authors.”
The magazine appears every other month in 18×26 cm, in 40 color pages. It is in its 8th issue, and has over 70,000 fans. Moreover, one of the main local designers of online applications developed for them the iPad Superhero application, which is also available for Android. Romanian comic book readers can download it for free on Apple store and on Google Play, allowing them to follow the adventures of their favorite superhero. The first issue of the magazine can be downloaded for free on the same sites. Their future plans include opening their own publishing house, and creating more magazines, including some targeted at the foreign market.
