Announcing my new comic: Brave Hearts
A story about love between a grandma and her granddaughter
Dear readers,
I’m proud to announce my upcoming comic Brave Hearts. I have a small teaser for you: The cover and the next page!!
Brave Hearts follows my grandma as she fights to stay present in her granddaughter’s life in the face of a war that is just beginning to unleash its terror. However, this is not a war story, this is a story about love and looking for beauty in a flawed world.
This comic will feature the main characters from Bleeding Hearts: My grandma and me. However, this time the story will be told from my grandma’s perspective because I was just a baby. This is an autobiographical story that means a lot to me, as it recounts the very first weeks of my existence in this hostile world.
While the exact locations of places in Bleeding Hearts were not important for that story, that is very much the case in Brave Hearts. For that reason, I decided to include a map at the beginning, which you can see above.
For a bit of context, our story of Brave Hearts is happening in 1991, before the official separation of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia from Yugoslavia, which happened in 1992. However, Croatia and Slovenia had already declared their independence in June of 1991. The Croatian war for independence started soon after that (July/August) and our story starts in September 1991. At this point, the war had not yet started in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where my grandma lived.
I will start sharing the pages of Brave Hearts in the next weeks. I will include a trigger warning before each episode, as its content might be triggering for victims of war, especially those who lived through the Yugoslav Wars. However, there will be no explicit violence shown in the comic and I believe that the heartwarming tone of my comic can initiate conversations long-needed for the path to healing.
Are Brave Hearts a prequel to Bleeding Hearts?
Yes and no. Each story is a standalone short story and it can be read as such. (I am planning 22 pages for Brave Hearts.) However, the stories are interconnected, not least because they have the same main characters. In short, you will appreciate Brave Hearts even more if you read Bleeding Hearts first, which is right here:
And its Croatian version:
Why this story?
As a kid growing up in the 90s in Croatia, the war and everything that happened (to the extent that I knew) was my normal. When many years later I started living abroad and people asked me if my family was affected by the war, I would usually reply “No, no one in my inner family died”. After 10 years of living abroad and working on myself, I have finally realized that a) my standards for “being affected” were understandably distorted by my environment, and b) we were all very much affected, but we never talked about it. But my grandma talked and this is why I know this story. This is also one of the only complete stories I have about how the war affected me, because I don’t remember much from this period. This time I am the one who doesn’t remember.
I often grapple with the question of what art is, as in what makes something art. And it occurred to me that one aspect of art is the ability to transform the artist, and in doing so having the potential to transform the audience. If this matters at all, my comics and their stories are deeply transformative for me because they allow me to see the world in a different light. I create these stories in order to discover this light and share it with you. Thank you for being here to read them.
I imported some of my older articles from Medium to Ana’s comics, so feel free to scroll down on its homepage and discover some of my older work. I can recommend two posts that feel especially relevant today. The first one recounts some of my early experiences with war and what I think of it today. The second post is a short comic with a similar topic. I made both of them when the war in Ukraine started. It breaks my heart that things have only gotten worse since then. I wrote this post last week before the war in the Middle East escalated and I’m afraid I have nothing new to say about this topic, except to repeat my message that peace is always the only way forward, and it can only be found through loving others. A truth those in power do not care to see.
A Letter Against War
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Ana