About Tigran Mangasarian

 

Tigran Mangasarian is an accomplished Yerevan-based cartoonist and illustrator. He is one of the pioneers of comic book art in Armenia, having established the first comics newspaper in the country in 1992. He is the author of six comic books, including Silence: Order from Constantinople a graphic novel about the Armenian Genocide.

 

He is also one of the co-founders of the Yerevan International Comics Festival, organized for the first time in 2008 with France's Association of Comics Art Promotion in Armenia (APBDA). The third installment of the festival was hosted at Tumo in April 2012. Read more>>

Professional cartoonist Tigran Mangasarian led a group of 13 students in a specialized comic book workshop. Participants combined original drawings with narrative text to produce a collection of illustrated stories centered around the city of Yerevan.

The first step was for students to come up with a narrative—old or new, fictional or real—related to the city, and develop a script around it. Some chose to talk about real-life events, including events from their own personal lives, while others based their storyline on tales from the city's history.

After deciding on a story, students worked with Mangasarian to create carefully molded dialogue matched up with comic strip imagery. They kept their stories within nine pages and stylized their graphics using Bamboo pen tablets and Photoshop design software.