Warburger » (Not appropriate for children)

Stripburger's largest and most impressive anthology to date, focusing on the topic of war.

For over ten years, Stripburger has been Eastern Europe's crown jewel in contemporary world comics and cartooning. The latest volume of their highly regarded annual anthology, this year titled Warburger, clocks in at 400 pages and is without a doubt their most ambitious volume to date. This crucially important edition, edited and produced in conjunction with the renowned Peace Institute, features over 80 cartoonists from Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Korea, and Israel.

Aleksandar Zograf, whose own life living in war-torn Serbia inspired his own vital anti-war comics, writes the Introduction.

The Washington Post

The Warburger cartoonists' work is closer to fine-art drawing than to conventional comics, so readers used to American comics may have a tough time reading it. Their drawings tend to be highly stylized, impressionistic rather than representational and more concerned with demonstrating the distinctiveness of the artist's hand than with conveying a narrative. Many of them adopt a sort of art brut style, with streaks, smudges and splatters everywhere. (The line between intentional and unintentional ugliness is somewhere in no man's land.) Others go to the opposite extreme: Lazar Bodroza's "The Mountain Wreath" is a series of stylized, angular silhouettes, and Ziga Aljaz and Sigmund's "Sunrise" is a geometric near-abstraction. — Douglas Wolk