bachelor's diploma — 2015
Bachelor's Diploma
A final-year series that puts Albanian history where it never asked to be: on a Coca-Cola poster, a comic cover, a game box, a magazine front. Twelve pieces, one joke told twelve ways.
Put a dictator in an ad and you find out which one the audience believes.
The series borrows the most trusted layouts of the last century — the soft-drink poster, the DC cover, the console box, the men's magazine — and drops national mythology straight into them. Nothing is parodied; the templates are copied faithfully so the collision does the work.
Drawn in 2015, on a laptop, at student resolution. The files are small and they are staying that way — they are shown here the size they were made.
on the coke series
A century of trust in one bottle, lent out for the length of a glance.
The endorsement works because the layout has never lied to anyone before.
Coca-Cola once ran a campaign built on exactly that trust: "I've been kissed by Marilyn", "I've been kissed by Elvis" — icons of the Western century photographed with their lips on the contour bottle, lending it their glamour.
Here the same line is handed to Hoxha, Mao and Castro. The purest symbol of capitalism gets kissed by the men who sealed their countries off from it — and the poster keeps smiling.
01 — më ka puthur enveri
The first one drawn, and the one that decided the rest: a leader sold with the warmth of a soft drink.
02 — 我已经吻了毛泽东
Same layout, different alphabet. The template survives translation better than the politics did.
03 — he sido besado por fidel
Green on red, cigar instead of straw — the only piece where the endorsement looks almost sincere.
2015
Made in 2015, before pastiche memes and brand mashups became an everyday internet reflex.
At the time this had to be argued for in a defence room; a few years later the same grammar was everywhere.
04 — lego kruja wars
National history as a family-friendly tie-in, rated everyone 10+.
05 — between past and future
Half helmet, half chrome: the hero everyone keeps rebooting.
06 — death of superman
If you are going to borrow a myth, borrow the biggest one available.
07 — man of the year
Independence, relaunched as a cover story with a flag on the moon.
on the franchises
Give a national hero a franchise and watch the myth accept the merchandising.
Kruja as a box-art location, Skanderbeg as a reboot with a release date.
08 — red lanterns #1
Rage as a superpower — the one costume that needed no redesign.
09 — power girl #1
The dialogue is lifted from real interviews; the costume is the punchline nobody wrote.
10 — njeriu me top
A tabloid nickname taken literally, in full sentai yellow.
on the method
Nothing here is invented. Two real things are simply put in the same frame.
The joke is the adjacency — the drawing just refuses to blink.
11 — rrugë të bardha — the head
An alternative poster for the 1974 Kinostudio film: the mind, wired and snowed in.
12 — rrugë të bardha — the hand
Its companion sheet — the same cables, reaching instead of thinking.
on the joke
Two things that should never share a frame, printed as if they always had.
The method is simple and deliberately dumb: take a layout the eye trusts completely — the century-old soft-drink ad, the DC cover, the console box, the men's magazine — and put inside it the one figure that layout was never built to sell. No caption explains the swap. The reader does the collision themselves, and that half second of belief before the absurdity lands is the whole piece.
Parody needs accuracy to work, so the references are copied straight: the contour bottle at its hundredth anniversary, the New 52 trade dress, the ESRB badge, the credit block of a 1974 Kinostudio film. Dictators get the warmth of advertising; a national hero gets the merchandising of a franchise. Nothing is mocked directly — the templates indict themselves.
Let's make the next one.
design with guts — art with soul