Strip Art Features

Our company, SAF - Strip Art Features, was founded by Ervin Rustemagic in 1972, in Sarajevo, Bosnia (ex-Yugoslavia). One year before, Rustemagic -- then 19 -- had founded the comics magazine "Strip Art," which was published in Sarajevo and distributed in the entire ex-Yugoslavia. In 1984, "Strip Art" earned the prestigious "Yellow Kid" Award at the... International Comic Convention in Lucca, Italy, for best comics magazine in the world. From 1972 on, Rustemagic was very busy trying to put his little agency on the map. In the beginning he worked with a small number of authors and sold the publishing rights to their comics to foreign publishers. In mid-1970's he started working very ambitiously with some of the world's leading comics authors. Since at that time he was not able to finance production of new comics by himself, Ervin would in the beginning contact authors who had already produced comics and owned the rights to them, but did not exploit them anymore. Very soon he managed to put together an impressive catalogue of comics titles for international distribution. The list of SAF's authors was breathtaking. One of these authors was American artist Warren Tufts. Ervin loved his series "Casey Ruggles" and "Lance," which used to be published in the 1950's, but could not be found anywhere later on. SAF acquired the rights to those two series and immediately managed to sell them to publishers in several countries, including Dupuis, one of the leading publishers of comics in the French language, which published the entire "Lance" series in color in their weekly magazine "Spirou." Managing to gather under its roof quite a few big names from the international comics scene -- among them Hermann and Joe Kubert -- who were producing new series of their comics exclusively for SAF, in the 1980's, Strip Art Features became one of the world's top five rights and management houses, handling comics for more than 500 publishers worldwide. Sarajevo, the home of SAF's headquarters, became a war-torn city in 1992. SAF's offices ...Read More