Blog Tour: ‘Dare to Disappoint’

Ozge Samanci’s Dare to Disappoint is a graphic memoir about growing up in Turkey. Here’s the blurb:

Growing up on the Aegean Coast, Ozge loved the sea and imagined a life of adventure while her parents and society demanded predictability. Her dad expected Ozge, like her sister, to become an engineer. She tried to hear her own voice over his and the religious and militaristic tensions of Turkey and the conflicts between secularism and fundamentalism. Could she be a scuba diver like Jacques Cousteau? A stage actress? Would it be possible to please everyone including herself?

In her unpredictable and funny graphic memoir, Ozge recounts her story using inventive collages, weaving together images of the sea, politics, science, and friendship.

Today we’re participating in a blog tour in which Ozge describes how she created the collages in the book. If you’d like to read the other pieces in the blog tour, the full schedule is here.

Pebbles

While working on a chapter in which there is an anecdote about pebbles, I took a trip to Greece to participate an exhibition. Through out the trip I had pebbles in my mind. Once the exhibition was over I went to my habitat, next to Aegean sea at the Mytilene Island. I collected pebbles while I taking walks at the beach. When I returned to Chicago, I painted these pebbles with acrylic, made eyes from beads, coated them with varnish and they turned them into pebble characters. I used pebble characters in one of the collages in Dare to Disappoint.

Filed under: Graphic Novels