There’s a saying in wrestling, “The masters know three tricks but keep one to themselves.” Well, Oguz Aral passed even that third trick along to his students, who consequently regarded him not just as a mentor but as an elder brother, even a father.

SITUATIONS WORTHY OF ‘GIRGIR’
Oguz Aral, who left his mark on the last forty years of comic strips in Turkey, was only fourteen when he first set foot in Babiâli, once the hub of the Istanbul newspaper business. Spending most of his time there rather than in school drawing cartoons for various newspapers and magazines, Aral started his own column, ‘Girgir’ (the word means ‘funny’ or ‘amusing’ in Turkish), in the daily Günaydin. In the first issue of ‘Girgir’, which eventually developed into a magazine, Aral said: “From now on we are going to try to cast our net wider for humor in order to amuse ourselves with all the situations you’ve ever witnessed or imagined that are worthy of ‘Girgir’.