Sunday, 9 May 2010

Where do balloons go? (comic)

I had originally written the script to this brief comic for an Ukranian artist who left the project before she had any chance to put pencil to paper. The story slept a sound year-long sleep until I met Spanish artist Franki. No doubt he was just what this little story required. I admit I failed in convincing him to use his matchless watercolours, but his mastery of Illustrator was a fair deal instead. The original texts were in English and I still like the English version much more than the Spanish translation. Though both versions must be good enough, I think. So, any one you choose to read, I hope you enjoy it. I’m leaving links to both of them.

[Postcript - June 1, 2010: Yesterday I came across something on the web that really put me off --a French animation whose tone and idea are exactly the same of this comic. And the worst thing is that these authors got ahead of me by almost one year. I don't know what to say. I was quite proud of this story but now this fact blurs my love for it. The only thing I'd like to make clear is that I hadn't known or heard about this animation before writing my script, and that all this is nothing but a sad coincidence. You can see the French video here.]

[Postscript - June 2, 2010: Let me copy a fragment from Franki's response after watching the video, something that cheered me up a bit: "The coincidence is shocking. But it's just a coincidence. Our story is reasonably different, although I admit the balloon's route is quite similar... OK, tooo similar... But it's not the same. That was my impression while seeing the different scenes of the animation (...) We must take it as a coincidence to have made a comic so close to the animation. We're two auteurs. Upright ones. We create stories, we don't plagiarise. We know that, and that's the only thing that matters."]

  • Click here to read the English version online .
  • Click here to read the Spanish version online.
  • Dowload the comic in English as a CBR (here) or PDF (here).
  • Download the comic in Spanish as a CBR (here) or PDF (here).
  • You can download the comics viewer CDisplay to read the CBR files (click here).

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