Publishing activity of the Association

Ivan Šivak - "Perun's guilt"

The comic with the working title "Perun's guilt" was conceived as a continuation of the existing children's picture book by Ivan Šivak, "Ajla and the Legend of Samobor", which explores the fantastic world of Old Slavic legends and myths from the area of Zagreb and Samobor, and introduces readers to the adventures of the little mermaid Ajla.

"Perunova's guilt" brings us a narrative and locational expansion of the research of Old Slavic legends that are intertwined with the fairy-tale current everyday life of the natural wealth of the Rijeka hinterland and the Risnjak National Park. Rusalka Ajla is incarnated in the body of a nature guard girl of Risnjak National Park, who begins to discover the hidden world of Slavic deities and the whole range of magical beings, which she can now see thanks to Ajla, Perun's daughter, who lives through her.

Through a combination of circumstances, dark and magical adventures, vanity and the power of Slavic deities, the creative mind of Ivan Šivak leads readers through a visual journey of forty (40) pages, on a journey to the past and present and fairy-tale locations from all over Croatia.

The comic is significant at the level of several counties in Croatia, and the text is particularly concerned with the hinterland of Rijeka and Risnjak National Park, as well as Samobor and Zagreb. The theme of the comic is Old Slavic legends and mythology that intertwines with the present, so this strip can be classified as "urban fantasy", one of the currently most popular genres of speculative fiction, in which authors like Neil Gaiman or Ben Aaronovitch excel.

Ivan Šivak introduces readers to an alternative present in which, due to a series of natural disasters, the landscape has completely changed, the Neo-Pannonian sea has risen and submerged all of Zagreb. Through these fantastic landscapes, readers from all over Croatia can become interested in the work because they will find interesting locations that are their home or have visited, and most of all they will connect with the narrative of Old Slavic legends, which is still extremely active in smaller towns both in the hinterland and on the coast. Croatian. Many readers will remember their own childhood and the stories of their grandmothers or nonnas, and the mythological material covered in the comic will delight even the expert eye. The locations presented in the comic are the surroundings of Rijeka, Risnjak National Park, a mountain lodge on a hill in the Samobor Mountains.

Ivan Šivak

Ivan Šivak, mag. of animated film and new media, was born in 1985 in Zagreb. He graduated from the School of Applied Art and Design, Graphic Department, in 2004. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2011 at the Department of Animated Film and New Media. Since 2011, he has been a member of the Croatian Society of Fine Artists, and since 2022 he has been a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Samobor.

At the beginning of 2022, at the CNB competition, he was declared the first-prized author for the design solution of the 2-euro coin.

In October 2022, he presents himself to the Croatian cultural scene with his author/illustrator picture book, the first in the series, "Ajla and Samobor's Legends".

In 10 years of his professional career, with over 40 successfully completed projects, he works for many clients in Croatia as well as abroad, focused on the field of illustration, animation and comics. In 2016, in cooperation with HagMD, he animated a short animated film of an educational nature about the prevention of forest fires - "Fire is no joke", for which he created a comic of the same name in 2017. He became an art director in the video game industry in 2018 on the project "The Hand of Merlin", which he successfully marketed. He is leaving the video game industry in 2021 to devote himself to original projects.

He also holds art workshops, among which those from 2012 and 2013 stand out in Belgium, where as a representative and leader of the Croatian group he participates in the Youth Exchange projects "Explore Dirt!" and "Together as One".

As an external professional associate in 2021, he will hold a course at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek. He holds lectures and workshops at primary and secondary schools, colleges and conventions.

He lives and works in Samobor, where in his studio I devote myself to the author's projects of children's picture books and comics for an adult audience.

Fantasy Laboratory authors - "Trance"

The collection of stories with the working title "Trans" is conceived as a collection of ten stories of different lengths. The expected scope of the finished collection is about 120 cards of text, and it brings perspectives, preoccupations and fresh literary voices of young people, authors up to 28 years old.

It is about the generation born after the war, which was too young to perceive the economic crisis of 2008, and whose maturity was marked by mass migration to Ireland, the pandemic and the current situation caused by the war in Ukraine. It is a generation that rejected radio and television, focused on the mobile Internet, socially connected with physically distant contacts, within social bubbles where microcultures exist.

Their experience of the world, personal and social relationships, is built on foundations completely different from those on which all previous generations grew up. That is why the collection of their stories brings a special insight into the development of new thoughts and a new way of experiencing the world. This is precisely where the title "Trans" comes from, which marks the transition from the old to the new, to transhumanism, to some new visions of the future.

The editor of the collection is Zoran Krušvar, psychologist, journalist, famous and award-winning Croatian writer, translated abroad, and manager of various multimedia projects.