Nikita Yarygin

Nikita Yarygin, Moscow

FROM THE AUTHOR, FIRST-PERSON

I can’t not draw. Inside my head it’s like a huge office, library or archive. By the bridge of my nose, between my eyes, as if between two windows, stands a work desk, where a tiny, amusing, but tired and fairly capricious man sits and labors. He ceaselessly generates and sketches ideas, and then holds up his drawings to my eyes and demands that I do exactly what he’s done.

If I don’t respond to his call immediately, he despondently tucks away his drawing in a stack of others and rushes back to the desk to do the next sketch. When the temporarily superfluous ideas leave him feeling cramped and stuffy, the unhappy man falls terribly ill, and I suffer this illness with him.

The man has authority. He made me become a professional artist, made me win the only comics contest covering the whole USSR, made me start my own publishing company, made me illustrate and publish books.

While I’m working, I’m alive. And I’m not worried about a creative crisis. The plans I have span decades yet to come.

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