About
This is the dress rehearsal. This is where artists and writers sharpen their storytelling abilities and warm up their drawing pens. This is the Velvet Rasputin stream of consciousness laboratory. This is where the muse comes out to play. You can call it a comics blog. That’s a fair assessment. This is also the home of the old Get Lost and Rasputin Catamite v1.0 archives.
In a parallel universe, not all that dissimilar from our own, a band was born out of hope for the future and complete despair over the present. Sometimes, this band visits our universe in the form of demonic puppets, but today we tell a story about their parallel world:
Iruktsk native, Dmitri Shapinov was booted out of Nickel, a government sponsored boy band, despite his popularity and obvious vocal talent in 1988. He was considered far too old to perform. He quit school shortly after his dismissal. Unable to find work in the increasingly fragile economic environment of the crumbling Soviet Union, the sixteen-year old boy took on a job as a clandestine disc jockey for illegal parties.
It was at one of these small parties, that he met and got into a brutal fight with Zoya Malama, a runaway punk musician. As it turned out, she was a long-time fan of his work with Nickel. She and Dmitri shared a thirst for blood and two hearts full of lust. Thus began their tumultuous, violent and artistically rich, love-hate relationship.
Zoya and Dmitri spent much of their time listening to foreign records and watching horror flicks. After watching a bootleg video of GG Allin in concert, Zoya and Dmitri were inspired to come up with their own stage show. Zoya named the concept Upir’s Mark, after a particularly bad hickey that her then sharp-toothed boyfriend left on her neck earlier that day.
The music of Upir’s Mark, a perverted combination of Russian folk music, Soviet propaganda, demonic prayers, political commentaries, techno and metal, caused outrage and excitement in underground circles in Eastern Europe and beyond, from 1989 through 1996, the year of Zoya’s spectacular, murder (or suicide) on stage.
This is the comic blog of current Upir’s Mark members, Dmitri and Sasha Shapinov, Laisandra Press and Ace Machiavelli.
(A Catnose Comics production.)
