Tomaz Lavrič

Biography

The comic strip “Diareja” has appeared in the magazine Mladina since 1988. These are short, ironic strips in which the author responds to current events in Slovene politics with a minimalist line. They carry the signature TBC.

Tomaž Lavrič was born in 1964 in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia. The exact date of birth is given differently: some give 10 November, others 3 December. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 1986 his work was shown at an exhibition of academy students at the city gallery. He began working professionally in illustration and comics in the late 1980s at Mladina, where he drew illustrations, cartoons and “Diareja” itself. Besides the signature TBC, he used the pseudonyms Josip Visarjonovič, Lovro Matić and Ton Ton. Alongside “Diareja” came albums of his own. “Rdeči alarm” (“Red Alert”, 1996) is an autobiographical account of the Ljubljana punk scene and alternative circles in the socialist period. “Ratman” (1997) is a local superhero parody with nods to the comics artists he grew up on. In the same year, 1997, came “Bosanske basni” (“Bosnian Fables”), a war drama. In 1999 it was published by the French publisher Glénat. The French edition is credited with the Grand Prix at the comics festival in Sierre, Switzerland, and the “Silver Lion” award from the Belgian Comic Strip Center.

Lavrič likes to run several projects at once and often changes his style of drawing. The Slovene comics artist Jakob Klemenčič called him a “great chameleon”, a man who draws “in a thousand styles”.

In 2001 he worked on three books at once: a collection of stories about life in the new capitalist countries of Eastern Europe, “Novi časi” (“New Times”); a series of black-humour gags, “Ekstremni športi” (“Extreme Sports”); and the fourth volume of the French series “Le Décalogue”, written by Frank Giroud. It was the first project for which he did not write the script himself. Then came the post-apocalyptic science fiction “Lomm” (2002–2004), the Balkan crime cycle “Evropa” (2003–2004) and “Slepo sonce” (“Blind Sun”, 2004), a collection of poetic science-fiction stories printed in the alternative comics magazine Stripburger. These works were also published abroad: in France, Italy, Croatia and Serbia, and “Ekstremni športi” in Spanish as well. The 560-page collection of “Diareja” was published by Mladina, in 2002 by some accounts and in 2003 by others. In 2003 “Diareja” was shown in Ljubljana and Zagreb, and in 2006 his “Izjave desetletja” (“Statements of the Decade”) was shown in Maribor. The survey exhibition at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana in 2010 was the first of its kind for a Slovene comics artist. In 2014 his work was included in the Brussels exhibition “100 Years in the Balkans: The Comic Strip Resistance”. In autumn 2015 a large exhibition, “The Magic Language of Comics”, prepared by Jure Mikuž, opened at the Cankarjev dom gallery in Ljubljana; a catalogue of the same name was published with it.

In 2015 President Borut Pahor awarded him the Medal of Merit of the Republic of Slovenia for his contribution to Slovene illustration, caricature and comics. The citation noted that the author moves easily from humour to realism, from social themes to science fiction, and from caricature to abstraction and sign-based drawing. In 2017 Lavrič received the Prešeren Fund Award for his publications of the previous two years and for the trilogy “Lomm” and “Tolpa mladega Ješue” (“The Gang of the Young Joshua”). This trilogy, “The Sorcerer”, “The Healer” and “The King”, was printed in Mladina from 2015 and appeared in album form in 2017–2019. A French black-and-white omnibus edition came out in 2018.

In 2026 “Bosnian Fables” was published in colour in Slovene and Croatian.