Master i Margarita
Michael Blank
Michael Blank (°1979) is an illustrator and fantasy artist from Stamford, Connecticut, United States. He was born in Ukraine, but immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1990.
At the age of 16, Michael Blank started making comic strips. At the time, he was already making illustrations for Печатный Орган [Pechatni Organ] or The Printed Organ, a Russian magazine published in New York from 1994 to 1998 by Gennady Katsov (°1956) a poet, writer and journalist of Ukrainian origin.
Like many Russian-speaking youngsters, Michael Blank had read The Master and Margarita at a young age, and dreamed of turning it into a comic book. He suggested it to Gennady Katsov, who agreed to publish it in The Printed Organ. Later Blank would say: «This work was unpaid but I was getting exposure and being a 16 year old getting a whole page dedicated to my illustration was a pretty big deal. My page would be featured every week or every other week depending on how much time I had».
When I asked him how he was able to start this project at such a young age, he replied: «My young age helped. If I were older I would never tackle a book with such complex and philosophical themes and turn it into a comic book».
Michael Blank
The Master and Margarita by Michael Blank counts 70 pages. It includes Mikhail Bulgakov’s entire novel, and the young artist worked on it for three years. He could count on the help of his family. His mother Irina Alabina did the lettering - «Her handwriting was better than mine» - and his father Gennady Ulman helped out interpreting editing the text.
Blank's comic strip has never been published as an album. After all, he doubts himself whether the quality of his work was good enough at the time: «I was a teen, and many of the pages are amateurish and I am a little embarrassed to share them». Yet he was kind enough to provide us with some pages. You can see them by clicking on the image below.
Click on the image to download some pages of the strip
Technical details
Album
Master i Margarita
Artist
Michael Blank
Publisher
The Printed Organ
New York, United States
From 1996 to 1998
With the link below you can download an excerpt of the comic strip.
