TURHAN SELCUK
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival would like to express its sincere condolences for the death of pioneering cartoonist Turhan Selcuk, the father of the contemporary Turkish comic strip. Selcuk’s work was presented for the last time in Greece, in the context of the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, in a hugely successful exhibition.
Turhan was born in Turkey in 1922. He published his first comic strip in the newspaper Turk Sozu in 1942 and a year later he launched humor magazine Akbaba. He published in numerous magazines and newspapers, while a significant number of his cartoons are now housed in the permanent collections of several European museums. The success of Selcuk’s work can be traced in the humanistic and egalitarian character of his concepts, in the promotion of human rights and his support for any struggle for freedom, as well as his seemingly effortless, humorous drawings. In Turkey, beloved Selcuk was known as “the line that speaks”.
