A Much Longer Explanation

...too arty for comic book lovers, too comic booky for art lovers

Do you like comics? So do I. Marvel? Hell no! Okay we’re gonna be friends then.

This is not an "artist statement" - that will come some other time. This is an introduction to The Micturating Angel.
A spiel. A sales-pitch. But not an explanation – maybe an excuse? A necessary use of words to explain images that have already said all they can?

Do you like comics? I mean REAL comics, like Charles Burns’ stuff, or Druillet’s or Kago Shintaro or Nihei Tsutomu?
Or The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman?

Right.

But what about weird stuff by the original Surrealists and the Dadas? Are you familiar with Max Ernst’s collage novels or Gilliam’s animations
from Monty Python? What about free jazz, avant garde music and the writings of William Burroughs? The (good) films of David Lynch?
Those books from the 90s put out by V.Vale, the REsearch books? You familiar with the æsthetics of early industrial music culture
or with the visuals of punk underground collages and photocopy art?

Am I laying this on too thick?

You wanted a statement, an introduction, so a schooling you’re gonna get, son.

Right. We’ve established the basics, so meet The Micturating Angel, the Naked Lunch of comic books! I unashamedly call it a comic,
"graphic novels" are for pretentious twats. But its a comic with a fatal flaw: too arty for comic book lovers,
too comic booky for art lovers – where do you draw the line?

Why even draw it? (And why even draw a comic in the first place? Why not collage it?)

I grew up in Eastern Europe, pre-Fall-of-Communism, so my background is a little different from yours. I read mostly French comics
translated into Magyar, I read nonsense literature from Germany and local writers and science books (never became an astronaut though).
Emigration was a grand adventure and high school was a ridiculous shock: all the beauty of learning coupled with everyone
hammering a round peg into a square whole.

Squares man. They can be so beautiful when they’re not people.

Like the panels of a comic book. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In high school I invented surrealist writing – not being aware of its well-established existence. It saved my brain for greater things.
Eventually I met some actual surrealists, some actual poets and artists and some actual interesting life.

And here we are today – and I’d like you to meet my children – The Micturating Angels (there’s more than one).

Q: What does “micturating” mean?
A: Pissing.
Q: Wut?
A: It’s all you get.

A surreal collage art-comic series seven years in the making (and counting). Somewhere between 2ooo – 3ooo collages in total,
including the guest stars, the Secret Chiefs (guys in charge of this here Cosmos). Unravelling the adventures and sanity levels of young girls
against their captive, oppressive world (is this a feminist comic? I don’t know…). Young girls against crappy old men and institutions,
religious zealots, ignorance vs. science, freaks!

Drawing on source materials ranging from hardware catalogues to religious imagery to medical illustrations, alchemical instructions,
furniture assembly instructions, "dirty" comics, mangas, giallos, and cannibalistic self-re-absorbtions,
the Necronomicon (containing not all but most of the sigils of the "Fifty Sacred Names of Marduk"), engineer’s manuals and
mathematical formulæ

– do you still like comic books?

Then you’ll love this one! Playing with the conventions of comics to create striking visuals, adventures revealed through
non-linear story-telling and complete non-sense dialogue – yes, the words are a red herring – The Micturating Angel is a unique comic
that will never be understood by anyone – and that makes it an enduring mystery, I hope. (Aren’t questions better than answers? No they’re not.
But Bigfoot is more interesting when you DON’T know that it’s just mountain-lion footprints.)

And there it is. My seven year Grand Opus, unlike its predecessors (all the other books I’ve made), and a never to be repeated exercise by me.
And I WANT you to enjoy it! I really do, I want you to look beyond the confusion, I want you to stop trying to make sense of it and revel in
what it actually IS: an ever-shifting series of nightmares laid out like the storyboard of a Hollywood blockbuster that will never be made.

Welcome aboard. I hope you like THIS comic.

Xtian, 2019

“I LOVE your collage work! It is VERY surreal… your comics are great! … Good luck with your project!”
Rev.Ivan Stang, Church of the Subgenius

“… a very original comic...”
Surrealismo Internacional

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