Nina Van Denbempt is a Belgian artist born in 1989 and graduated in illustration in Ghent, a beautiful city in Flanders where also talents as Brecht Evens and Brecht Vandenbroucke grew up. She founded Tieten Met Haar collective with other girls from Sint-Lucas School of Arts and it’s in the fourth issue of their anthology that I first encountered her work, where deformed bodies, irregular lettering and the juxtaposition of different techniques give life to unconventional pages, as you can see in the comics I’m posting below. The first one is It is not out of the ordinary to dance to jazz music anymore, a four-page story published in the Tieten Met Haar anthology and in the Captain Foggy Brain zine, distinguished by a well-balanced mix of lyricism and irony. The banality of everyday life and of its rituals seems one of the main subjects of Nina’s work and it’s also a key theme in the second feature, Runbeast & Lola in Technoland, a more structured tale set in a future repressive regime, with an original use of color. Nina is actually working on her first full-length comic, Barbarians, a travel-love-action story that takes place in an apocalyptic Europe.
