No! I'm a Stork!

"It is hilarious. Very to the point. His characters are so well and funnily designed. He has a special talent for animals – most of his characters are animals. I would pay money to make Arkas into an honored, national figure. Yes, it’s very funny that nobody knows who he is. To tell you the truth I have met him once… But he’s not the kind of guy who gives interviews or who talks in any other way than in his strips. He doesn’t care about status. He doesn’t need to care. His work is so hilarious and significant that it speaks for itself. When somebody creates art—books, paintings, movies, whatever—he has to talk about the human condition. If you asked me what is the subject of Dostoyevsky I would tell you it is the human condition. There’s a very good strip about a very disappointed rooster. He’s in psychoanalysis. He’s the only rooster among twenty chickens but none of the chickens like him. He tries to make love to them but they tell him he’s awful. And in the same place, there’s a pig who is very fat and very dirty, doesn’t care how he talks—and all the chickens are in love with him. And the rooster just doesn’t know how to continue life in this condition, where the fat pig is so attractive. It’s funny, and it’s international. It’s a picture of the human condition, not just the Greek condition. Life is at the same time ridiculous and poetic, high and low, all together. Well, here’s my punch-line: I believe that if foreigners had the chance to get to know the real Greece they would be much more enthusiastic, much more charmed than by the archetypes of Zorba or the resistance against the Germans, the Colonels, or the bankruptcy. I’m afraid that all around, from America to Italy and Greece, it’s the same. Trump was elected because he sold the American Dream, a myth. Populism and nationalism and the idea that you can be against globalisation—and I perfectly understand that globalisation is a harsh thing, hard on many people—are myths. And they are stronger nowadays, more persuasive than a glance at the real situation. But I also think that with these kinds of myths, if you try them, if you put them to the test, you can overcome them rather easily. Yes, these books give us the chance to re-see, to re-watch our lives. Reading a very good book is a bit like being baptised; you look around you and see differently. That’s the magic thing. They give you the ability to see your own life again."