OLD PICTURES OF PEOPLE FROM NIŠ AND BANAT IN THE COMIC STORE AND CINEMA OF STEVAN SREMAC

Text topic: Strip and Identity

Text author: Бранислав Милтојевић

Writer Stevan Sremac (1885–1906) “had spent the best eleven years of his life in Niš” working as a grammar school teacher. Some of his best works were created in the city on the Nišava river. Among others, it was there that he wrote “The Elemir Ball: an Epic in Ten Poems”, for which he and Stevan Nikšić Lala (1853–1938), a professor and caricaturist,have also engraved “pictures in the text”. With a lot of talent and spirit, Sremac solved the problem of dramatic display of the sequence of events, using language of the comics (and even of the graphic novels)to visually decompose and illustrate the epic. Before he would begin to scribble verses, he would make a 21.8×13.8cm sketch using pencil on paper, breaking the story into eight separate scenes and two fields,thus actually using the embodied form of the contemporary medium of comics.