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<\/p>\n\n
\u201cDraw!\u201d <\/strong>is a monograph that gathers Kordej\u2019s work outside comics, that is, outside those hundred-odd comic albums and graphic novels, as the author himself calls them, and there are so many that they are not easy either to count or to classify. What has been collected here, then, is shorter-form work, which does not mean it lasts any less, only that it requires less labour than drawing page after page of comics. The material is divided into chapters: Early Works, Youth Press, Mainstream <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n All that material, varied in dimensions, techniques, and categories, was masterfully handled by Melina Mikuli\u0107<\/strong>, a graphic designer whose name is mentioned far too rarely when Fibra is discussed<\/p>\n\n The monograph was published last year, to mark fifty years of Kordej\u2019s work. Not without bitterness, Kordej notes in the introduction that he gathered all the material himself, that neither his home city nor art theorists and critics were of any help to him, so he simply bypassed them. And so, for the last five or six years, he collected his own work, borrowing it from owners, scanning it, and returning it, in order to create an archive once and for all. <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n The title is not in English by accident, nor is the author\u2019s surname rendered as Kordey. Luckily his first name is not Sre\u0107ko, or he might have translated that too into Felix. All the texts are translated into English and French because since 2013 Kordej has also held the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the French Republic. He said this about it in an interview with Vladimir \u0160agadin for Telegram: \u201cThe idea was for the book to be distributed beyond the region. It\u2019s an opportunity for Fibra and editor \u0160unji\u0107 to start selling their own products on the foreign market instead of buying foreign licences for the rest of their lives.\u201d <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n Maybe I am being tedious with all these technical details, but as an editor I know what a brutally huge job this is, how complicated it is to arrange all those indices and numberings, prepare the visual material, and organize it logically and clearly… Nothing but congratulations. I\u2019d send everyone a postcard, if postcards were still in fashion.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n Since this book spans fifty years of work, it also encompasses the above-mentioned categories of applied art that have more or less disappeared, much like the aforementioned postcards. In a way that is not surprising, because Kordej is a graphic designer by training, and because his restless spirit and early commercial offers \u2013 he was the first full-time employed comics artist in Yugoslavia <\/strong>\u2013 did not allow him to graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Graphic Arts, so it is somehow perfectly natural that he worked in newspaper illustration, posters, logos… This book is also a tribute to graphic forms that are rapidly becoming extinct. By the way, I am sure that posters by major artists like him would sell perfectly well, be framed, and hung on walls \u2013 so there\u2019s a suggestion. This book is also a small history of techniques and technologies, from the 0.3 Rotring technical pen to digital assistance, a small history of graphic design and printing, of fashions and changes, and finally of the maturation and development of an artist, from a kid who morphs figures and crams the format full of illustration from edge to edge, to an artist who commands the languages of visual art exactly as purpose demands. <\/p>\n\n I asked him whether he uses AI, since he mentions in the book how much computerization and Photoshop helped him, or whether he might one day. \u201cI don\u2019t use AI, and I won\u2019t. Unlike the jerks who use those programs, I actually know how to draw and paint. And I\u2019m fast as lightning;). Btw \u2013 I still haven\u2019t seen a successful comic done with AI. There\u2019s a long way to go before those jerks figure out how to handle AI comics \u2013 you really need actual knowledge and experience for that…\u201d <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n I noticed he had appeared on Instagram, maybe the old dog did decide to learn a new trick after all, so I asked him about that too. Kordej says: \u201cOh, I\u2019m only doing that for promotion \u2013 \u201cTexas Kid\u201d will be coming out in the U.S. soon via Kickstarter. The campaign was a success, and advertising on Instagram and Facebook helped with that.\u201d <\/p>\n\n After that leap into the present, we return to basics. Doing applied art means, first and foremost, satisfying the client \u2013 something Mirko Ili\u0107, Kordej\u2019s longtime and close collaborator, also likes to stress \u2013 which makes it all the more important that \u201cDraw!\u201d includes works that for various reasons were never published. <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n Because of all that, and because of this mass of work stretching over half a century and reflecting the <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n I even realized that I own the first two covers he ever made: the sleeve for Parni Valjak\u2019s 1977 LP \u201cGlavom kroz zid\u201d and the journal \u201cPitanja\u201d with its 1979 Novi kvadrat theme issue. Add to that the fact that I used to cut his comic \u201cVam\u201d out of Stripoteka and bind it separately with Scotch tape \u2013 and, sadly, lose it \u2013 and forgive the personal tone, but Kordej meant a lot to generations. For a long time now I have been able to recognize his drawing at first glance, which only shows that this is real authorship, a dev <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n I do not know exactly what it is that I recognize: perhaps the strokes, his hatched shading, the softness of his line, or the realistic faces; perhaps details like anatomical cues, such as the often-emphasized bridge of the nose or those round, full breasts that defy gravity; then again, perhaps the often radical framing from unusual angles… Or perhaps simply the whole. <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n What might that body of work have been if, when war broke out here and everything darkened and died, Kordej had not gone abroad to earn a living, to Canada for ten years and then Denmark. But even that misfortune had its uses, because back then it was not possible to work nomadically by computer from anywhere where there happens to be internet. \u201cDraw!\u201d also includes covers he made for series such as \u201cCable\u201d, \u201cSoldier X\u201d, \u201cNew X-Men\u201d, \u201cStar Wars\u201d, \u201cTarzan\u201d… Those covers were still largely unknown here. <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n He began collaborating with local publishers back in the 1980s, starting with Mladost, and he did the greatest number of book covers for Algoritam, thanks to an old acquaintance with Neven Anti\u010devi\u0107. It is incredible that editions of \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d trilogy for which he drew the covers, as well as other Tolkien <\/p>\n\n At present \u2013 in fact for some twenty years now \u2013 Kordej has worked as a house artist for the French publisher Delcourt, mostly on comics of alternative history, though he also reaches into fantasy and dystopia. I assume he would not mind at all drawing another newspaper illustration now and then, or designing a logo, returning to those forms and in doing so bringing back into focus the formats that are disappearing.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n Writing about books like this, monumental ones \u2013 this one could quite literally serve as a foundation stone \u2013 is actually a thankless task, because from such a mass of work there is no point in pulling out individual pieces for analysis, while it is impossible to encompass the whole<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n\n And it is equally impossible not to recommend this piece of history and art, for long leafing through and for even longer admiration and wonder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cDraw!\u201d is the kind of a huge book very few people deserve, but let\u2019s say Igor Kordej is doubtlessly one of them, because he is one of the best comic-book artists in Europe, at the very least. And it is also the kind of massive volume that, apparently, only Fibra and Marko \u0160unji\u0107 are capable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[46,45,48,44,47],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strip","tag-strip","tag-fibra","tag-francuska","tag-igor-kordej","tag-marko-sunjic"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bestbook.hr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/PXL_130813_6510727-683x1024.jpg\")
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