Season 4 Episode 36

Nina Bunjevac:

Time’s Bomb

“Fatherland is really about who my father was, getting to understand him, and also an attempt to explain how politics can tear a family apart, just like they tore apart the people of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.”

Nina Bunjevac‘s new book, Fatherland , explores her family’s fractured history against the backdrop of 20th century Yugoslavia. We talk about how she left her country in 1990 only to find that it wasn’t there when she went back. We also explore the risks and challenges of researching a terrorist organization, the comics tradition in Yugoslavia and her own comics history, Serbia’s culture of friendship, why the Toronto Comic Arts Festival is the best comics event in North America, how I discovered her first book, Heartless , the perils of too much stippling, why it was controversial to publish Fatherland in Serbian dialect in Croatia, and more.

“When I got to Canada when I was 16, I saw an issue of Raw, and that pretty much did it.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

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About our Guest

Nina Bunjevac started her art training in Yugoslavia, at the Djordje Krstic School for Applied Arts; in 1990 she moved to Toronto, Canada, where she continued her studies in art at the Art Centre of Central Technical School; in 1997 she graduated from OCAD in the Drawing and Painting department. Formerly a painter, a sculptor and an art teacher, Nina found her calling in sequential arts, a form that seemed to naturally evolve out of the narrative component in her sculpture installation work. Pen and ink became her medium of choice.

Nina’s comics have appeared in a number of local and international publications: Komikaze (Croatia), Black (Italy), GIUDA (Italy), Stripburger (Slovenia), Zone 5300 (Netherlands), Stripolis (Serbia), ArtReview (UK), Asiatroma/Le Dernier Cri (France), Broken Pencil, Exile, Taddle Creek (Canada) and Mineshaft (USA). Her debut collection of comics, Heartless , came out in September 2012 with the Nova Scotia-based publisher Conundrum Press, and was translated and published in France in 2013 by Ici-même Editions. In 2011 Nina received The Golden Pen of Belgrade at the 11th International Biennale of Illustration in Belgrade for the cover image of Balkan Women in Comics (Fibra/Croatia); in 2013 she received The Doug Wright Award in the Spotlight category, also known as The Nipper, for Heartless.

Fatherland: A Family History comes out this month in Canada from Cape Graphic/Random House and will be released in the U.S. in January 2015.

Photo of Nina Bunjevac by David Hawe.