Projects, Essays, Videos and Comics
Hi there, I'm Marin Balabanov, web developer from Vienna. On this website, I showcase some of my side projects, videos and writing about comics, computer history and development.
Archive of Demo Art and Media
ADAM, the Archive of Digital Art and Media is an art archive with an Angular frontend and an API served through Express/NodeJS. I developed it as part of my master's thesis for my MA in Media Art History.
Sports Calendar Web App
EventRadar is a calendar of sports events, where events can be added and categorized based on sports. I have implemented a simple user registration and login, so that only signed-in users can make changes to the calendar. I developed it in PHP, Symfony, TWIG (with Bootstrap 5), and MySQL.
Cleaning Company Website
In the first phase of this project, I created a static brochure website for a cleaning company in Vienna featuring their services. In the phase is in progress to create a backoffice admin interface.
The Story of Shatter, the first Digitally Produced Comic Book
This is an essay about Shatter, a comic book created by Mike Saenz, Peter B. Gillis and Charles Athanas in the mid-1980s on an Apple Macintosh (though with traditional, analog coloring). This milestone of the comics industry paved the way for other digital comics like Das Robot Imperium by Michael Götze and other digital comics.
How Technical Limitations Pushed the Early Demoscene to Produce Digital Art
This is my master's thesis about the demo-group The Exceptions during the years 1987 to 1989 in the Atari ST demoscene. These were the formative years of the Atari ST demoscene, and The Exceptions were the first to produce demos on the computer system.
The Telidon Art Collection at Inter/Access
This is the story of the Canadian Telidon system from the early 1980s, the artists who worked with it, the unlikely story of how their work was rediscovered by the Toronto-based Inter/Access gallery in 2015, and how to conserve digital artwork created with Telidon.
A Wide Variety of Videos
Over the years, I recorded a number of Youtube videos on many different subjects like the Bitmap Brothers game "Chaos Engine" on the Atari ST, about the iPad apps that support the full resolution on external displays, on how to draw Captain America and a number of different design topics.
Using AI Tools to Make Explainer Videos
What if you could create your own explainer videos without much effort? I decided to try it myself and made three explainer videos in only one day using generally available and cheap artificial intelligence tools. The results are perfectly workable. Take a look at the three videos that came out.
Youtube Series on Fantasy and SF
In 2013 and 2014, I made a series of Youtube videos about movies, comic books, science fiction, and drawing. The series covers a drawing tutorial, an experiment to draw like comics artist Rob Liefeld, visiting fantasy, and comics conventions and reviews of Doctor Who and an issue of the Fantastic Four comics series.
Creating a Comic Book on 1980s Hardware
In this project I created a five page comic story using 1980s computer hardware. I refurbished a thirty year old Atari computer, upgraded it and then pixel-painted comic using the art package NEOChrome Master and only 16 colors.
XEGO Comic Magazine
In 2005 and 2006, I published six issues of the comic magazine XEGO in German called "XEGO" and touted as "the trash comix egozine for the ego shooter generation". The covers were printed in color. The main feature starred Dani-E, the intergalactic go-go dancer, and ran for 16 pages which I produced in color but printed in black-and-white.
Tanim Graphic Novel
From 1998 to 2004, I wrote and drew a long-form comic book called "Tanim: Am Ende der Welt" stretching across more than 200 pages. The story marches towards what is ostensibly the end of the world ("Das Ende der Welt"). It culminates in an all-out slugfest and the sentient planet coming to Earth.