Dirty Thirty: Thirty Years of Making a Scene

"Stripburger styled its 2009 double issue as a travel guide to the ‘transnational entity’ of Cartoonia, inviting artists to select objects from each other’s homelands as inspiration. Foreign artists had to depict Slovenia, and vice versa; the result was emblematic as anything of their cosmopolitan mission and position. I picked Dirty Thirty instead because it’s newer, bigger, retrospective, and all in English: 400 pages celebrating 30 years, 20 countries—a great gateway drug to a true comics institution. The few familiar names Americans will find there have, apart from Peter Kuper and Julie Doucet, all come to us in translation: Jason, Rutu Modan, Anke Feuchtenberger, Danijel Žeželj. The rest is… discovery! Anthologies are a riot for the eyes. The sheer diversity of styles, palettes, stories, minds on display is staggering. You find things there in a raw state that may go on to become parts of larger pieces, or just gems that go on to become legends, never to be seen anywhere else. We’re often said, what with the various franchise universes ruling screens silver and small, to be living in the ‘Geekdom Come.’ What was once a subculture has gone mainstream. Comics as a medium is still less understood, even as there’s more factional policing than ever about what gets to be called a comic and who gets to be a fan. What, then, would it mean to have a comics culture, not just a culture of the bottom line? It would, I think, look a lot like the Strip Core collective . It would be local AND global, in Slovenian and English: fostering talent and interest with gallery shows, workshops, contests, lectures, a publishing house, while also facing outward to open and sustain international conversations of mutual influence. Stripburger blurs the line between book and periodical—the former’s heft and density, the latter’s ephemerality."