News

Cyprus Comic Con’s Artists Alley welcomes back illustrator Demetres Panayides and writer Marios Yiangou, co-creators of comic book DÆMONIUM!

The Artist

Demetres Panayides is a young comic book illustrator from Nicosia and his work has been published both in the US, as well as Cyprus. He describes himself as a “keen movie freak” with a special love towards horror, thriller and sci-fi movies. He is also a comic book geek and his favourite comic book titles are Spawn and Watchmen. Demetres loves dark and horror themes in art and he tries to incorporate those elements into his own personal art style. Some of his greatest influences are Alex Pardee, Ashley Wood, Todd McFarlane and Ben Templesmith.

Demetres notably designed the cover for local metal band Blynd’s first full-length album, titled ‘The Enemy’ and illustrated the mascot “Rusty Goblin” for the fantasy game workshop Isengard. In 2014, he was one of the ten runner-ups of a worldwide talent hunt held by American comics publisher Top Cow and his first comic, Artifacts: Lost Tales #1 was published through them. More recently, he illustrated a short story for local band Winter’s Verge, titled “The Tale of Adamar of Calthorn”.

He is currently working on a new collaborative comic book project called DÆMONIUM together with writer and illustrator Marios Yiangou. The story of DÆMONIUM is based in Cyprus and the comic will be completed just in time for CCC’17!

Make sure to follow DÆMONIUM on Facebook!

The Writer

Marios Yiangou works as a graphic designer for an offshore company in Cyprus. What he loves more than writing is talking about himself in the third person. Marios has been writing for more than 15 years, from poetry to prose to comic book scripts, although never professionally. An avid reader of history and mythology, he tries to incorporate elements of both in all of his writing, along with noir, fantasy and horror themes. And ranting – he loves to rant! He fancies himself a cinephile and a huge comic book geek.

His major non-comic book literary influences are Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Tom Wolfe, Jack Kerouac and Nick Cave. As for comic book creators – not that there’s any difference – Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis and Michael Carey.  DÆMONIUM is his first attempt at collaborating with another artist and presenting his work to the public. So, you know, be gentle…

CCC17 welcomes manga artist Orpheus Ganitis to its Artists’ Alley!

Orpheus Ganitis, aka Gun-it-is internationally and Doujima Gyro (銅島ジャイロ) in Japan, is a rookie manga artist, illustrator and story teller. Since April of 2017 he became a university student in one of the most historical art schools in Japan, the Seika University in Kyoto, the same university that created the International Manga Museum. His interest towards manga started with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し) and since then, Orpheus became obsessed with Studio Ghibli films and anime.

From 5th grade, he has been drawing illustrations and character designs, as well as making his own stories.  In 2013, he move to Japan, following his dream. Studied Japanese for 2 years, passed the N2 level of JLPT (the second most difficult Japanese exam for foreigners) which was his ticket to continue his studies. He then studied manga from April of 2015 to March of 2017 in Osaka Communication Art college (OCA 大阪コミュニケーションアート専門学校). After joining a real manga drawing environment, he realised that his works were still a premature attempt at drawing manga and committed to work hard and improve!

In terms of traditional media, he prefers to draw with pens, water colours, copic-markers and brush pens, while on PC, he uses a Wacom pen tablet. His software of choice, is Clip Studio Paint Pro and some times Photoshop. In order to improve his artwork, he has been taking classic art lessons and more recently, he stared researching other famous manga artists such as Murata Yusuke (村田雄介), Morita Masanori (森田まさのり) and Asano Iono (浅野いにお) from Japanese programs like Manben (漫勉) and Jump Ryu (ジャンプ流).

More recently, he presented his work in various magazines such as Jump +, Jump SQ, Young Jump, Weekly Magazine, Weekly Sunday (etc). He was praised by all editors, especially for his latest work, who found his passion and knowledge towards bird and insects very appealing. It was pointed out as unique and promising for future work. Leaving the good feedback aside, he believes that working at his university under manga artists such as Ouhinata Gou and Tanaka Keiichi, made him more modest, grounded and helped him realise how hard the road to success is. “A dream to live by, a dream to count on“.

Christis Christoforou, also known as Reddo, will be joining this year’s Artists Alley!

Christis is a self taught artist that learned how to draw by experimenting with various manga and anime styles, inspired by titles such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Bleach and BAKUMAN. He gets inspired not only by the drawing skills of his favourite artists but also by the unique and cool stories that each respective manga artist produces. He says that stories and character developments inspire him the most, rather than the drawings themselves. In the past, he had worked on short films, animating, drawing key frames and other various things that require good hand-drawing skills. He also experimented with tattoo design and graffiti, although nowadays he avoids that kind of work.

To see more of Christis’ illustrations, visit his art page on Facebook!

He spent one and a half years in Japan, learning the language while simultaneously getting as much feedback as he could from magazine and manga professors, in order to improve on his mistakes or bad habits. More specifically, he showed his draft manga to a manga teacher in Japan and an editor of Shonen Jump SQ magazine and was praised for his unique characters that were layered with deep personalities, while his art style was indistinguishable from native Japanese manga artists. The results and feedback he received made him confident that he is on the right track when it comes to manga.

Currently Christis is working his way up in the social media since he believes it is the best source to get attention and publicity nowadays. Furthermore, he is working on a concept for a mobile game, as well as polishing his manga stories. His future goals include to become someone that can produce any kind of project successfully and to live a life where everything he does is equally enjoyable as it is challenging.