1. Un gest frumos, de recunostinta

Winner of the Award for the Contribution to Serbian Comics Strip:
Novica KRULJEVIĆ (1927), Belgrade
Born in Priština on February 10th 1927, Novica Kruljević had changed many professions during his working life. He has been the multiple Yugoslavian champion in debate shorthand and has retired as Politika journalist-stenographer. But, he has been spending every available moment of his time-off dedicated to one of his three great loves: chess, drawing comics and painting.
He had debuted in 1960 with his first comics strip based on a far-eastern fairytale “The Fisherman and The Giant” on the pages of Politika’s Funnypaper (Politikin zabavnik). He had turned then to the classics of the youth literature and during the 1963-1966 period he drew for the same publication three more comics strips based on the novels by Jules Verne “Innocent but Sentenced” and “Mysterious Island” and “Bravo” based on Fenimore Cooper’s writings. It is interesting to note that the last one was published at the time in Slovenian Zvitorepec magazine but even more interesting is the fact that Novica Kruljević drew anew for the occasion the strip with minor deviations compared to the original. In the first half of the 60’s he had drawn a contemporary-themed sports-based strip written by a sport journalist Rade Stanojević. The mentioned strip was entitled “The Ring Stars” and it had its run as a daily feature presented in tiers.
When Politikin zabavnik transformed from the newspaper to a magazine format towards the end of the 60’s, Kruljević had published a series of comics pages about the distinguished sports personalities under the title “The Sportsman’s Story”. From that period remains a four-pager “Čkalja on the Moon” or rather “Čkalja’s Return from the Moon” starring the popular comedian Miodrag Petrović Čkalja. The comic was published in 1969 and along with Čkalja there were other celebrities of the day: Miloje Mića Orlović, Jovan Šćekić, Kamenko Katić, Milivoje Jugin and the others.
In the 70’s Novica Kruljević abandons comics work and turns to the fine arts and easel painting. In this field he has achieved outstanding results with several one-man exhibitions testifying to the fact.
Zdravko Zupan

2. Premii pentru editori:
Awards and Prizes for Comics Publishing in Serbia:

Winner Of The Award “Srećko Jovanović“ For Publishing In Comics Domain: (given by „Dečje Novine Dositej“ Publishing and Gornji Milanovac municipality): Vasa Pavković, Belgrade
Vasa Pavković was born in 1953 in Pančevo. He is a graduate of the Belgrade University – Faculty of Philology and has finished post-graduate studies there. He is employed at the Institute for Serbian language from 1977. He has published nine books of poetry, three novels, six collections of short stories, six anthologies, cca. fifteen books regarding Serbian traditional literature, six books of critiques, two books about comics – all in all, about 50 authored works.
He has begun reading comics over half a century ago on the pages of Kekec (Prince Valiant, Chlorophile et Antracite, Jerry Spring, Le Chevalier Blanc, Lucky Luke), Politikin Zabavnik/Politika’s Funny Papers (Flash Gordon, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Johnny Hazard); later he has got a hold of Nikad robom/Never Surrender, Biblioteka Lale/The Tulip Library, Crtani romani/Cowboy Picture Library, then weeklies such as Panorama and Zenit, then Stripoteka, Cak, Eks almanah… and so on, until today.
He has started writing about comics medium in 1984 on the pages of Književna reč/Word on Literature, then as a comics critic he started writing for Dnevnik, Vidici, Sveske, Vreme, Bestseler… so his two books on comics medium have emerged – Slatki strip/Sweet comics and Naš slatki strip/Our Sweet Comics where he has collected his articles on some of the most signifficant comics and authors, returning a certain reader’s favour to the medium of the Ninth art.
Together with Zdravko Zupan he has published a monography in Pančevo entitled The Big Dream, dedicated to Srećko Jovanović and comics artists he had promoted in Dečje novine/Childrens’ Papers editions.
He likes football, basketball, Rock’n’Roll and takes wild nature photographs of daytime butterflies.

Winner of the Award For The Best Publisher Of Domestically Originated Comics 2010/1011: KOMIKO Publishing, Novi Sad
Komiko the publishing venture has started in 2009 in Novi Sad with the intention to publish and present primarily classics of Serbian comics, along with artwork of current creators. Edition Golden Age – Time Travel Through the World of Serbian Comics presents achievements of our classic authors from the 1930’s-1950’s period. Along with this, Komiko organizes an annual competition for short comics geared towards younger and unrecognized creators. The best art from the competition is published in a luxurious representative anthology that showcases a cross-section through contemporary Serbian comics. Edition Modern Serbian Comics presents achievements of Serbian known authors such as Darko Perović, Zoran Tucić, Đorđe Milović and others in the form of classic BD albums. Since 2001 Komiko has spread into licensed titles presentations, like the works of Robert Crumb and Harold Foster but also the first time publishing of the best modern era creations such as The Silence, The Sea is Calling, Ghost World etc.

Winner of the Award for The Best Publication Of The Foreign Material In Serbia 2010/2011: Darkwood Publishing, Belgrade for Series CONAN THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CIMMERIA,
Book 1 – based on Robert Erwin Howard’s novels Savage Sword of Conan 1-7 plus short stories from the parts of The Hyborian Age
With the book entitled Conan – The Savage Sword of Cimmeria we are beginning Conan the Barbarian saga, the trademark of the fantasy sub-genre known as ‘sword and sorcery’. With the books we intend to offer through the incoming publishing program we want to unite all the stories from the classic period, i.e. all Conan comicbook adventures produced by Marvel Comics Group and published for two decades since the beginning of 1970’s.
With this book we are opening the first one of the two serials, within which we shall publish complete Marvel saga about the most famous barbarian in the world. Namely, Conan’s adventures were published in a lot of serials: stories inside this book have appeared in the Savage Sword of Conan magazine and the other most important serial was Conan the Barbarian. (…) Along with Savage Sword of Conan and Conan the Barbarian there were some short serials known for showing the first-time published stories. (…) The fact that these are smaller scale serials of course, does not draw the analogy that they are less important and such a mistake Darkwood as the publisher just did not want to allow itself. In some of these editions premiere comics were published directly building on the course of the plot from two main series, making it an organic, indivisible whole. Publishing only part of the story would be a terrible underestimation of devoted readers of our publications, Conan’s fans, but also a departure from one of the postulates of our publishing policy – gathering everything in one place, in a coherent whole, and making the book the way they always wanted to see it, but we ourselves had to roll up the sleeves to make it happen. ( … ) Since our priority were two main editions, we intended to pull out stories from special editions that we needed to form the whole, without following blindly every minor series within which Conan has appeared.
Within our edition Treasure Chest/Riznica we intend to follow on the larger size pages the original Savage Sword of Conan sequence, supplemented with particular issues of irregular and special editions devoted to Conan in black and white print, whilst our second edition shall follow Conan the Barbarian series that will appear in B5 size, i.e. the size of the original American publications of it. Another series entitled Chronicles shall be published by us in colour, continuing where its previous publisher [Beli Put] has stopped. A detailed lexicon of people, gods, kingdoms, Conan’s friends and enemies, as well as other important concepts in Conan’s world, will be launched from the seventh book to be published 2012th year and completed in the tenth book.
Slobodan Jović, excerpt from his Preface