ROBERT Melev left Bulgaria a minute before the fall of communism in 1989. The way he tells it, it had something to do with alcohol, some intemperate friends, one rebellious night and dissatisfaction with life in the army. "The next moment we found ourselves in Switzerland. I called my mom and told her." He spent three years there to mark the beginning of a 15-year global odyssey, which has been punctuated by short returns to his homeland. Changes wrought by the country's transition to democracy and capitalism over the years have never been too shocking.

He has lived in the Netherlands, sold trucks for a Belgian company in Senegal and at some point owned a bar. Throughout this time he developed an interest in martial arts. "I used to always fight," - it's a Balkan stereotype, he says - "I studied martial arts to stop fighting." Frustrated that he couldn't advance as far in his training as he wanted to in Europe, he took the advice of some teachers, and in 2000, entered under the tutelage of a sensei (master) in Tokyo where he studied aikido alongside two Japanese students.
He returned to settle in Bulgaria a few months ago, bringing with him a bagful of Manga - the uniquely Japanese genre of comic books. On his sensei's orders, he plans on opening a school of Japanese culture in Plovdiv, but in the meantime, he has joined with a friend, Ivailo Bekirov, 26, to start a new Bulgarian comic book, QTEH. QTEH stands for, roughly, Quit Technology Project, a movement calling for people to abandon unnecessary appliances and embrace a simpler "alternative life". For a biography that seems ever so slightly reminiscent of the first third of this summer's Batman Begins and any number of other superhero origin stories, it seems an appropriate chapter.

At 37, Melev is almost certainly the oldest person in the QTEH office and he carries himself with the relaxed air of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, wearing jeans, sandals and a t-shirt. He is a short, well-built man with sharp handsome features caught just short of middle age. He has the sparse hairs of a soul patch below his lip and a tiny bush of a beard on his chin. He speaks just a little too quickly and not always wisely. A younger and more personable Robert De Niro would have played him well.
The QTEH office is a posh affair, with relatively advanced graphic technology and freshly painted walls, though it is located in the industrial section of Plovdiv, not far from a large Roma slum. It's dead quiet inside, with young 20-something comic book artists staring at computer screens, colouring in sketches set to run in the book and developing design concepts. An enormous stack of undistributed copies of QTEH's second issue sits in the corner. Japanese movie posters decorate the walls. Melev sits on a couch in front of a coffee table covered mostly by his Manga collection and a couple of copies of Mad Magazine dating from 1998. For nostalgia's sake, there's also a copy of Rainbow, a popular Bulgarian children's comic from the communist era.

"I was always interested in comic books," he says, "with whatever is in my hand." In following such an attitude, QTEH, despite the message contained in its name, has no clear zeitgeist. Many of the strips in the magazine are ultraviolent samurai stories. One is a more humorous feature called Blato (Swamp) featuring a listless chain-smoking duck. This may be appropriate for a country, which, Melev says, "didn't really have a comic book culture. (Comic book artists) didn't have a practice. They didn't have a stage."

Bekirov, a short man with a well-trimmed beard says he was never really interested in comic books before going into the business with Melev. "I was just into acid." That's a joke, but he doesn't go into any more details.

In order to put together the first and second issues of QTEH, Melev and Bekirov spent the last few months extracting Bulgaria's hidden young comic book elite on the internet, posting wanted messages in Bulgarian comic book chat rooms. They found a hefty supply of artists, as young as 16, dotted around the country, in Sofia, Plovdiv, failed industrial towns and the countryside. Some had long been fan boys themselves, and had been playing around with pen and paper for years. Some artists had talent, but had no stylistic direction. Melev helped guide them.

George Ilkov Banderov, 21, who lives in Assenovgrad, a small light-industrial town not far from Plovdiv, is one of QTEH's greater stars. He is a collaborator on the Field of Destiny strip, a spooky samurai-laden gore-fest that fronts the magazine's second issue. It includes explosive fight scenes set in tall grasses and red-tinted voodoo dolls.

It seems a truly nightmarish piece, but Banderov shrugs off any such suggestions. "Everyone has their own nightmare concepts," he says. He is just working with some friends to put something together. Each page takes him two days of work.
Banderov is a young man with unkempt facial hair and a strange spiral tattoo on his left arm, a part of which he drew himself. He grew up watching Japanese horror movies and reading comic books himself - he names the Japanese Katsuya Terada and the American Simon Bisley as inspirations - though he's only been drawing for a year.

Tzvetan Nanov, 20, is one of the colourists stationed in the office. He showed me how he handled the shading of a robot figure that will appear in the third issue. With an electronic mat and pen, Nanov placed rust stains here and there, and white shadows to offset the gray colouring of the figure. He learned his craft partly from listening to audio lectures he downloaded from the internet. He said that his style of colouring was the American-style. 

Melev is still not completely happy about the comic book. One humorous piece called Mr Flirt which has a striking resemblance, one Bulgarian friend tells me, to the popular Cartoon Network show Johnny Bravo, may be discontinued in the next issue, he says. He hopes to solidify a certain standard by the sixth issue.

Starting the magazine has been extremely challenging and financially draining, according to Melev, and much of his complaints mirror those of the American comic book industry, which suffered a near-debilitating recession in the 1990s. 

QTEH is aimed at adults, but of course, booksellers often stack copies of the book with children's features, Walt Disney books and such things, he says. Although hardcore comic book fans will read the magazine, most Bulgarians unfamiliar with comic culture wouldn't bother with it, preferring celebrity gossip column fluff or Playboy instead. Here, Melev gets theatrical, playing a Bulgarian customer picking up a copy of QTEH, pretending he doesn't know what to do with it and throwing it back down on the ground.

The total production cost of the second issue, which had a circulation of 10 000, ran up to the astonishing sum of 40 000 leva, not including distribution fees, forcing Melev to set a, for some, prohibitively expensive 4.95 leva as the cover price. "Even if we sold 100 per cent of the copies," he says, "we would have yet to make a profit."

Melev is trying to offset the costs of his business by hiring out some of his artists to do graphic design work for foreign companies, though he does employ a slightly premature gallows humour. When they write the history of QTEH, he says, "it will be a horror story".
If QTEH does fail it would probably be difficult for Melev to take for some very deep-seated reasons.

He says that when he studied martial arts, Bulgarians could not believe that he would be any good at it because he was Bulgarian. Similar responses, he says, greeted his comic book aspirations. "If I were American and were presenting comic books, they would be interested." The cultural inferiority complex is "a Balkan thing". Though he doesn't say so directly, it may have been one of the greater elements pushing him out of the country in the first place.

There are other things about Bulgaria he doesn't like, particularly the pop-folk cafe culture, which he seems to dislike as much for its exclusive Bulgarianness or Europeanness as anything else. Comic books, in his eyes, are different.

There was nothing particularly Bulgarian about QTEH, Melev said, other than the fact that every artist involved in its creation was Bulgarian. It would take a while before a distinctive Bulgarian comic book style develops alongside American, French or Japanese manners. But that seems beside the point for him. Melev is a citizen of the world. And comics, he says, are "world culture".