The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is already the protagonist of a comic. Published in the United States with illustrations by the Argentine cartoonist Pablo Martinena, the comic delves, in full color and without skimping on details, into the fascinating life of the actor and comedian turned politician, from his birth to his crucial present, marked by the war with Russia.
“Where were you born, where did you come from, how did you get to the acting career, where did you participate, what was your significance and then, when you were a candidate for president, managed to reach the presidency. And even more so now being at the forefront of a political and war situation for which he is world-renowned”, says Martinena in an interview with Efe.
Published on May 18 by the North American publisher TidalWave, and with a script by Michael Frizell, “Political Power: Volodymyr Zelensky” it has 22 pages and is available, in print through Amazon and digital on various platforms.
From northern Argentina
From his home in San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, in the Martinena, 50, from northern Argentina, has been making illustrations for the US label for more than two decades, which has a line dedicated to making comics with the biographies of famous figures. .
It was so that, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed closer and closer and the face of the Ukrainian president monopolized more and more space in the world press, TidalWave proposed to the Argentine to get down to work to convert Ukraine. Zelenski as a character from his own comic strip.
A process that has forged, from a distance, with the screenwriter Frizell, in charge of the texts and dialogues that accompany the characters.
“We have a continuous contact, in which we are seeing what add what take into account, what We need to point out so that the story we are telling is also as dynamic as possible”, Martinena clarifies.
“Michael Frizell gives me a lot of information about it, he tells me: ‘andá; Seeing this report, this video, this page… and from there. rescatá a ‘kodak” moment, which can be summed up in one or two images'”, reveals the illustrator, who drew each of the characters and later did the inking and coloring digitally.
Key moments
For example, the book, which has a simple version and a hard cover version -in which the cartoonist captured The president’s face inspired by the latest Batman movie- begins with the recreation of the image of Zelenski and his collaborators in kyiv on February 25, when the war broke out, when, in a video recorded As a selfie for the politician, they warned that they had not left the city.
The rest of the pages navigate through the life of the sixth president of Ukraine, from his birth in 1978 in a Soviet Jewish family, the fall of the USSR and his time in the world of acting, without ignoring how, while playing a president in the series “Servant of the people”, he launched himself. entered the political arena, won the elections and reality ended surpassing fiction.
There is no shortage of vignettes in which his meetings with former US President Donald Trump and former Israeli Prime Minister Donald Trump are evoked. Benjamin Netanyahu. And even the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, slips into one of the pages.
Asked if the comic is given a political aspect, Martinena warns that the publisher always tries to be “neutral” in that aspect.
The illustrator, who previously drew the lives of Pope Francis, Leo Messi, Diego Maradona or Nelson Mandela, highlights the need to achieve a balance between text and illustrations: “because It’s not that one is more vedete than another. You have to see the work of the writer and those who follow after,” he says.
Martinena has four children -two of them collaborate with him in the coloring of some of his works- and he inherited from her father’s love for drawing: & quot; another type of communication, this other language, which is precisely what I use to transcend borders,” he points out.
Red Cross Benefits
On the TidalWave website , editor Darren G. Davis acknowledges how much this project means to him because of his Ukrainian heritage. so much so that, as it is revealed, a part of the profits obtained by the comic will be donated to the International Red Cross for the crisis in Ukraine.
“The editor and I wanted to focus in the man beyond of the current media focus: Ukraine’s war with Russia and Zelensky’s battle of wills with Putin. Who is he? what? does it work? Why? is the right leader for Ukraine right now?”, adds screenwriter Frizell.