BRATTLEBORO — In the fall of 2011, artist and musician Marek Bennett journeyed to Eastern Europe.
Traveling though his great-grandmother's native region of Eastern Slovakia, Bennett lived with distant cousins and studied local stories, food, languages, folk music, and artwork. He also took part as his relatives observed seasonal traditions and celebrated holiday harvests.
At the same time, Bennett saw firsthand how the Greek debt crisis brought the European Union to the brink of disaster, toppling the Slovak government and collapsing the economies throughout the region.
During and after his trip to Slovakia, Bennett posted his experiences on his website to share with friends back home and readers all around the world.
Bennett has now amassed those posts into a graphic novel, one that he says is “about travel, life, work, harvest, and social justice in Eastern Europe.”
Incidentally, its main character is a cartoon rabbit.
In “Slovakia: Fall in the Heart of Europe,” Bennett tells the adventure of one rabbit in his quest for family among the roots and ruins of the Old World, as he “hunts down old family stories, forgotten graveyards, ancient artwork, and modern fairy tales,” and finding himself “crossing hidden ethnic fault-lines with unexpected results.”
The 600-page book of hand-drawn, black-and-white artwork, published by Birdcage Bottom Books, is available on the publisher's website for $20.
“Slovakia” will also be for sale at Bennett's comic workshops events and appearances throughout the fall.
Bennett drew himself and his cousins as rabbits; all other characters appear as other animals.
Trip funded by readers
Bennett conceived of his book “Slovakia” as a way to research his own family's history over the past century of immigration, upheaval, changes, and challenges in Eastern Europe.
“You can not imagine how naive and innocent I was in the beginning of my trip,” Bennett said. “After only a few minutes there, all my preceptions began to change. You must not have a preconceived notion and follow though it. A more responsible model to yourself and your subject is to be flexible about what you see and recreate it honestly.”
During the time Bennett traveled in Slovakia, he drew daily comics documenting the scenes, stories, and people he encountered.
“This project was not about making money,” said Bennett, “although getting some helps.”
Eventually, readers on Bennett's website funded the entire trip to Slovakia through donations and pre-orders of the book.
“Rather than apply for a grant for this project, I decided to let it evolve as I wished. So I announced what I was going to do on my website, and waited to see what support I would get from my community of readers,” Bennett said.
“I did not create 'Slovakia' with some specific audience in mind,” he said. “Rather, I enlisted my audience to share with them what I might have discovered in my adventures.”
Teacher and musician
Bennett, a New Hampshire native, is an award-winning cartoonist and musician who teaches about comics and performs music at schools and libraries throughout New England.
He is the author of four graphic novels, including “Nicaragua Comic Travel Journal,” an account of a 2009 comics delegation to northern Nicaragua, as well as the long-running weekly newspaper strip “Mimi's Doughnuts.”
Bennett leads discovery-based comics workshops, helping artists of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities discover their unique capacities for storytelling.
He holds B.A.s in music and mathematics from Brown University and an M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction from Keene State College.
Bennett is a rostered teaching artist with the New Hampshire Council on the Arts, Children's Literacy Foundation, and the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire.
He also is a member of the musical duo Headtracks, which performs American Civil War folk music.
Two versions, two effects
Bennett's “Slovakia” exists in two forms: the web version, where readers were able to follow Marek/Rabbit's adventures as they happened, and now the bound-book version, where the whole adventure can be experienced in one reading.
“I see the book as a way to encapsulate a part of the overall experience, and hold it in your hands, and read through it in a fairly linear fashion,” Bennett said. “It's important to me that a project like this have a clear narrative to share with readers. The webcomic is a more sprawling, less-ordered archive of the process.”
Nor is the content of two versions the same.
“It's true that the webcomic version of 'Slovakia' contains most of the book, but there are several sections of the book that did not appear in the webcomic, for reasons of timing, subject matter, and also just for the sake of making sure the book has some special features of its own,” Bennett said.
“However, it's also true that there are many many stories that appear in the webcomic and not in the book. These tend to be storylines that were important to the overall trip and project while I was working on it, but that did not fit into the overall narrative of the book, with its focus on specific subjects,” he explained.
Also, Bennett provides source links, video, audio, and documentary photographs from the trip on the website but not in the book.
“I did a final count towards the end of the production phase,” Bennett said. “I drew somewhere around 900 pages for this project, and the book has 600 pages.”