Hinterland Dubravka Matakovića (iliti nastavit će se…)
Dubravko Mataković’s Underland [or, to be continued...]

Summary/Abstract: Dubravko Mataković ( born in Ivankovo, 20 August 1959) is a Croatian comic strip author of postmode-poetics: heroes of his comic book stories are actually victims of the “big history”, but they are also heroes of their small environments, which have been so ruthlessly polluted by authoritarian powers. Being social caricatures, they are paraphrases and parodies of Heroes from different film, literary, comic-book, and even political-historic Narratives originating from around the world. Mataković makes fun of the Big History as well as of the concept of Authority, and so his Small Heroes, with their absurd ventures, are not ridiculed beings, but rather punk subjects. They have emerged from the worn-out patterns of Power, emerged from the history that strove to contaminate the subject through the whole arsenal of neocolonial arrogance. They have appeared as errors in the civilisation’s code, but these errors are shown by Mataković as our oversight rather than their own incongruence. In terms of drawing, Mataković follows the Jacovitti tradition, his frames are poetically figuratively neo-realistically overflowing, he reacts to the mass media noise and its illiterate preference for emphasis, he is a genius of black humour where hardly anything is funny – it is hysterically funny, but also cumulatively neo-humanistic in a demobilizing way.

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