To be honest, we ordered Alisik #1 because of Junko Mizuno’s cover; we didn’t know what to expect. When the first issue arrived, we were amazed by the beautifully haunting illustration. We were glad to meet this cute teenage girl and follow her in her wandering between old zombies from another time.
Hubertus Rufledt, the writer, travelled the world once as a sailor man. Then he realized that the greatest adventure is behind the typewriter and became a comic writer. Helge Vogt, the artist, wanted as a child to become a palaeontologist, but he ended up drawing dinosaurs and monsters as a profession. He has already worked for Disney, Adidas und many other firms.
Together they created the world of Alisik. It started as a short animation, which Rufledt was so taken with, he just had to take it out of the graveyard and turn it into a comic series. And Helge Vogt was more than happy to venture into something darker than all those fairy princesses during his time at Disney. They imagined the world of Alisik under the spell of a dark fairy tale aesthetic that recalls German romanticism and Victorian Gothic fiction, along with the anti-princesses of Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman, and Hazao Miyazaki.
Titan Comics, via their new European comics imprint, published it and billed it as “a cross between Emily The Strange and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book – a beautiful dark and gothic tale of mortality and what happens after death.”
From the press release:
When Alisik wakes up alone in a cemetery, she thinks she’s in the middle of a nightmare. Terrified, she flees into the night, but realizes she is invisible to everyone she meets. She really is dead, with no memory of how it happened…and only the ghostly residents of the graveyard can help her unravel the mystery of her afterlife.
“We all know these feelings from our teen years,” says Rufledt. “You feel lost and misunderstood. On the other hand, you are unsure or you may have feelings of inferiority. Sometimes dark thoughts assail you and you want to surrender to a melancholic mood, and we wanted to tell all that with our story. As it were, Alisik is an allegory of adolescence.”
The issues go for 5,99 euros each, have 64 pages and come in two different covers. The TP has 104 pages, costs 16,99 euros and features Junko Mizuno’s cover.
More stories of Alisik have already been published in Germany and will be adapted in english in the near future.
