Dubravko Mataković, interview - 2006.
Owner of photographs used in this article is Dubravko Mataković.
This article is print ready.
Dubravko Mataković is Comic book artist and a musician and both would probably blow your head off.
One can expect to see and hear pretty much anything on a SEPTICA concert (www.septica.com). Septica is a band that plays a peculiar combination of Death Metal and Hip Hop music. The song lyrics are both explicit and humorous and so is the concert audience. Amongst the concert audience you get to meet groups of fans wearing their undergarments (drawers) as hats, however you can also meet quiet blonde girls or even "suits".
You should also have a look at the situation in the backstage....oh my; the burly guy with heavy moustache is Mataković himself, and standing right beside him is a man who looks like a specialized institution escapee (who is the bands second vocal artist). There is also a muscular guitar player wearing a T-shirt which leaves little to ones imagination doing some heavy posing, a phlegmatic bass guitar player and a drummer vaguely resembling Ringo Star.
As soon as the music starts so does the laughter, some of the greatest hits are the legendary "Gaće" which translates to "Drawers" and "Nisam vratio oružje u MUP" which roughly translates into "I haven't returned my firearms to the ministry of inner affairs".
Septica in action!
Comic books are almost as explicit as the song lyrics, but their unique feature is the amount of detail one can find in each frame. One thing is very specific to all the comic books done by Mataković; one has to read them thoroughly, almost explore them for a lengthy period of time. By the same time it would take to read one Alan Ford comic, you would be able to read not more than two or three pages of one made by Mataković. The sheer potential these comic books have of making you laugh is enormous, especially if you are a fan of black humor.
Find out more about Dubravko Mataković:
Perhaps some of our readers are unaware of the fact that you just might be the single most censored author in former Yugoslavia?
Well, not really, in fact I was censored only once, before the war. There was one frame in a comic book depicting JNA (Yugoslavian National Army) soldiers poking their eyes out using screwdrivers, so the editors felt they had to "fix" it because it was not a most pleasant thing to have published at a time when there were ongoing negotiations with JNA and a lot of provocations going on. Besides that, at that time all the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia felt an intense psychological need to censor themselves, so all of us knew all too well which things were right and which things were wrong.
Why are your comic books and other publications so predominantly black humored?
When you spend the majority of your life in real socialism without having any sense of hope, and when you survive one war and the period of uncertainty which follows it, it's a good idea to hold on to your ability to laugh. Some people find it tacky, even vulgar, but at the same time they can't stop themselves from enjoying black humor. There are also all sorts of influence one gets from the world of comic books, movies, and (naturally) real life.
How did you decide to form a Death Metal Hip Hop band in your forties? Did you one day happen to think to yourself "All right, now let me see what are the things I haven't yet done in my lifetime? Oh! I never founded a Death Metal band!" and then decided to start one? Also, how did you come to choose SEPTICA to be the name of the newly founded band?
Well, this whole band thing is something that I had been pursuing, with several setbacks, ever since my teenage days. Those who know me better weren't at all surprised when I started a band since they already saw me performing on stage. This is my fourth band I think, but this one is different from all its predecessors as it is the only one that became widely known, most probably due to the fact that our current team invested far more effort into the band than the old team. Septica is basically a rock band with a touch of both metal and rap, and only a small portion of our music is about death, and even then it's more of a parody of death music itself.
The word "Septic" means contagious in a viral meaning, and the suffix "a" was derived from Metallica, which is a band that has what must be the best name amongst all the metal bands.
Picture from one of the gigs featuring front men.
When you were a child, what did you dream of becoming?
Goalkeeper. Short and simple. I am sorry today that I haven't been more serious about pursuing my dreams.
Is there something peculiarly wrong with the tap water in the Vinkovci city or something like that, because so many explicit artists emerged from the place (there are, indeed, some really explicit musicians form Vinkovci)?
I already mentioned the sense of hopelessness that prevails in that particular region. One can actually feel the sense of futility in everything you start doing. That is one possible reason why so many extreme people come from this area. The people who live in this town are the masochists of life, they had endured crap you wouldn't believe, and yet they love their home town. I live here, and that by itself is something I don't fully comprehend. I got my university degree 23 years ago, I moved back to Vinkovci from Zagreb, and I never found employment here. Today I earn my living from stuff I do in Zagreb. Simple people are the dominant species here, I can't remember anyone ever ordering anything from me.
Are the extremely grotesque characters that can be found in your comic books and song lyrics pure fiction or are they portraits of some of the real people you know (we will exclude politicians and other public figures from this)?
All of those characters are pure fiction, but in them you can find a collection of various character traits in both the physical and the psychological sense. Those characters portray all the idiots I met in my life and with whom I had both positive and negative experiences. I simply take these creatures from my sub consciousness and then I give them an added measure of stupidity and that's about it. Even the characters that are based on real persons, namely the politicians, are much closer to fiction than to the reality. They are left with minimal amount of real life characteristics and everything else about them is just exaggerated. The time when I did comics about politics is, luckily, behind me. I find more universal topics much more appealing.
Was there a specific comic book style that influenced your work?
Well, all the comic books I encountered as a child had some effect on me, there were all sorts of comic book styles; cartooney, realistic, freestyle, agency specific. When I was a kid there was a huge influx of comic books so we couldn't buy and read all of them as it would simply be too expensive, so we traded them and by trading managed to read all of them. At that time of my youth everyone was into comics, and I mean everyone. Of course one has to take into consideration that we didn't have video games, internet, and even the TV program was scarce.
Another concert picture.
Do you have a personal idol from the world of famous artists?
Actually I never did have a real personal idol, I mean, none of them had any real effect on my work. I respect all genuine artists, they are extremely strong individuals and one can do nothing but admire them.
Why is there so much detail in your comic books?
Heh, as the time goes by the level of detail keeps diminishing. As a kid I was fascinated by Jacovitti because his comics were full of detail and had a lot of side-track story lines in them.
When I started publishing comic books I wanted to do something very similar to that but I also wanted to add something to make them uniquely mine and to attract the readers. As the time goes by I have more and more work to do and so the amount of detail declined over time.
Also, some media don't allow me to add a lot of detail in the first place, for an example, comic books published on "Iskon" web portal (Mataković Comics on Iskon web portal have to be relatively small in size so the people with slow internet connection could enjoy them. I had to drop the amount of detail because it would just go to waste due to compression.
How do you come up with all the weird stuff in your comic books and in your song lyrics?
Well I guess I have a specialized neuron complex in my brain that sprouts weird and incoherent stuff all the time. All I need is one main idea, once I have it everything goes smoothly, almost effortlessly. Sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse.
Close-up of our artists.
How do the people you know personally accept your explicit form of artistic expression?
I don't think they occupy themselves with that, rather they are preoccupied with the fact that I don't have a regular job. I just draw some stuff and money comes raining from the skies. That's how they see it. They simply do not understand how much time and effort I had to invest to reach a certain level. I even spent a lot of money to get where I am now. They also don't see how much time I spend at the drawing board, furthermore they don't know that I can't allow myself to get sick because then I lose job assignments. I don't have any holidays and I work on Sundays too. In the end all they say is "Where does all that stuff come from, how do you do it?"
Where does your obsession with drawers come from? (a song named "Gaće" from the Septica album, drawers are also a frequently found motive in comic books by Mataković).
He, He, it's just for fun. I think that men look funniest when wearing socks and drawers, especially the ones that almost completely cover your kidney area, we call them "bubregare" (or kidneyarse, same kind of literal translation 
. There are also many stories going around male social circles about which side of the drawers faces front and which faces hind etc...
Do you travel often?
Not really. My job doesn't allow me to go anywhere for a time period longer than 2 days. In summer I go to the sea side but I take my work with me, my PC included, so I go for a swim and then do some work.
A seasonal illustration by Mataković.
What would your message to the young generation be? Do you have any special advice for them?
Its easy acting smart once you pass all that "youth" stuff. Now that I have my own kids and when I look at things from a perspective my advice would be to steer clear of drugs and other poisons, avoid crime and other crap. Life is but one, and you get old too soon. The worst thing you could do is to bore your life through a needle, or prison bars.
More about Dubravko Mataković at: http://www.webart.hr/matakovic/.
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