When Kyle Daniels moved from California to Atlanta, Georgia, he didn’t know many people around the area. Thus, he set out on a quest to find new acquaintances. He had an old MySpace account which he decided to use to locate new friends within the state of Georgia. However, as fate would have it, the search results accidentally gave him both the state and the country of Georgia, and an interesting woman who seemed to have the same interests as him, but hailed from the latter. A conversation sparked: “So I’m busy talking to the woman of my dreams who is on the other side of the world, in a country I had no clue even existed until I met her. Three weeks into the relationship, we started to bond; she spoke better English than I ever did, which made it even harder for me to fathom what I discovered later. I actually approached her with the following words: let me come down and see you once you’re out of school in a few months.” Her reply was: “Unless your vehicle has a speed boat attached to it, it’s not going to happen.” So Kyle decided to surprise her. He did not have a speed boat, but instead he bought a plane ticket and flew all the way to the country of Georgia, to see the woman he was strongly in love with. “This was before you guys had a real airport; it was just a little office warehouse instead,” Kyle explains.

After going back and forth for four years from this Georgia to that Georgia, Kyle decided to get married to his chosen one, and settle for a while in the Georgia that is a country, not a state.

Since he received certification in massage therapy in the US, he found a job here in Tbilisi at the Aura Plus Weight and Body-Modeling Center. Shiatsu, deep tissue, and effleurage are just some massage techniques which Kyle practices: “Fatigue alleviation, overall relaxation, improving blood circulation, and pain relief - it’s all incorporated into massage. It can serve both medical and relaxation purposes, while muscle manipulation is the heart and mind of massage therapy,” Kyle explains, and continues: “You’ve got to think about your muscles like a piece of gum; when you’re chewing on it, it can be molded however you want. If you were to put the piece of gum in the freezer, it would harden and remain solid and inflexible until you chew it again. In short, in cold weather your muscles become tight. They need to be warmed up to be molded again in a way you want them to.” Kyle sheds the light on to how to relieve certain areas of pain through massage. His word of advice is to get into a hot tub or a sulphur bath, have your muscles warmed up to a certain degree, and then apply pressure as hard as one can take onto the areas that are painful. What Kyle gave special emphasis to during the interview was to never get a massage while one is drunk: “Massage contributes to increased circulation of alcohol through the bloodstream, thus it can cause very dangerous alcohol poisoning,» he says, probably based on the observations he has made about the Georgian people and their fondness of drinking.

In fact, Kyle has discovered that Georgians are missing a very significant element of mass culture: “Since Georgia has given me so much, I want to give something in return. Something that you guys unfortunately don’t have yet but have definitely seen and heard of before - a comic book. Especially, a comic book story about a Georgian character.” Thus, Chanchika’s character was born (“chanchiki” means “bolt” in English, and the character was inspired by a real-life person - a friend of Kyle’s). The story so far is as follows: a young man, who has recently lost his parents, goes through trials-and-errors as he tries to care for his younger brother, and survive a perilous fight with unknown evils that plague his world. Later on, he discovers he is not alone and there are others willing to help. Hopefully, Kyle, just like his character, will find friends and collaborators in a country he hopes will be receptive to his creative ideas. For that to happen sooner, he has opened a Facebook page titled “Creative Comix Tbilisi” meant to unite artists and people who are simply interested and willing to create comics together to contribute to the development of the industry. “I hope through this, I can inspire other people in Georgia to create their own stories and artwork, and put them together to develop something beautiful, for the young and the old alike,” says Kyle.

Meanwhile, Kyle enjoys his time in Tbilisi. Going together with his wife to Mtatsminda Park, where they fervently play a game called “Pump it Up” (a likeness of “Dance, Dance Revolution”) and then visiting a restaurant colloquially called “The Pink Mingrelian,” where he may eat up to 20 khinkalis in one sitting - a true deed of a superhero -, he probably feels a bit like a comic book character himself. Being an African-American by ethnicity, Kyle admits: “I feel like an exotic object here in Tbilisi,” a notion he seems to like and emphasize through demonstrating even more exotic touches to his appearance, such as wearing an afro-pick or comb in his hair (for which he constantly gets strange looks from passersby), and skater gear, for instance. “I want people to get used to what we may bring along from America,” Kyle elaborates. At the same time, he is eager to learn Georgian fluently. The first words he learned are those of politeness. “I want to be respectful to the people I meet, and convey a message that through me, they are gaining a friend, and a new member of this great and hospitable family that is Georgia.”


18.06.2010