About me
My name is Symberzite (pronounced ‘zym-ber-zyte’) and I’m a concept artist and illustrator based in Eastern Europe with over a decade of experience. I’ve mostly worked on videogames and currently illustrate board games for myself and clients. I also had a brief experience in film, although, frankly, it didn’t go anywhere. This site is meant to be a halfway point between a professional portfolio and something personal, thus the unconventional web design. My current passion project is a tabletop game called “Blackacre”, which is an Edwardian Occult series that I want to expand into a full setting complete with TTRPGs, games, comics and the such. As of the time of writing, I’m working on my PhD thesis, so I may miss certain pieces of mail or attempts to contact. If all else fails, do not feel ashamed to contact me again after a period of time. As of the time of writing, I'm not available for long term contracts or employment, but am open to volunteer work, collaborations and select comissions.
Below is a list of ways of contacting me, excluding a summoning circle. Ranked from most to least active. Please use my mail address for work-related inquiries only, I already get more than enough spam.
MANIFESTO
Table of Nonsense is my solo imprint for publishing comics, zines and tabletop games. It’s a catch-all label for stuff made by yours truly or by one of my close friends. God willing, I may actually build it up into something substantial over time.
The goal is to make innovative, weird and, most importantly, accessible media that bypasses cultural, linguistic and class barriers to create new forms of art.
The human potential for creativity has never been higher, yet we're stuck in an era of lost futures and stagnation due to our economic system, peer pressure and pollution of the information ecosystem. That's why the 'lower' forms of art such as genre fiction, comic books and videogames are important to cultural development. They tend to have a lower barrier to entry, which makes them great outlets for marginalised groups as well as new ideas. For example, early comic books managed to sneak in everything from ancient aliens theories to radical ideas.
While I hold a special place in my heart for genre fiction, it's hard to deny that even independent creators tend to fall into the trap of regurgetating the same set of tropes until they became clichee. For example, the term "generic fantasy setting" would be an oxymoron in a sane world. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find an OSR or comic project that doesn't have elves, dwarves and a pseudo-Albion setting.
There's nothing wrong with drawing from the classics, far from it. The issue is that a lot of contemporary culture exists in a state of media incest. Fantasy is written by aping Dungeons and Dragons rather than Beowulf or Arthurian romance. This creates a sort of 'hall of mirrors' where the original soul of the genre becomes distorted beyond recognition.
