The end of this week (Oct 15-18) is CPH Zine Fest!
I’ll be there, which will be my first time at both CPH Zine Fest and Ungdomshuset (and Dødsmaskinen).
I’ll be at Ungdomshuset on Saturday, at the tables of ParaVox/Wormgod & CBK and there’ll be a whole lot of other stuff!
See you there!
Also, on Nov 6, we’ll (CBK + Tusen Serier) start a triple exhibition at Fish Tank Gallery / Panora, but more on that later…
One day, all the gods at once came into existence and decided to have a war, and the humans were more than willing to participate…
This may or may not be the start of my presentation on Monday, Oct 12, at 19.00. I’m doing a presentation about myself at Serieskolan (Friisgatan 15B, Malmö), organized by Seriefrämjandet Skåne. It’s free and you don’t need to be a member or anything, so you can just drop in!
I’ll be talking about Piracy is Liberation, and some of my other books, I think, but also a bit about Angry Animal and what’s going on in the near future with ParaVox and CBA. I don’t know, I’m usually not doing a lot of prep work for these things, but I also want to do my best to live up to the event description:
Mattias Elftorp is an institution in Malmö, the Comics City; an apparently neverending energy who is constantly working for the acceptance of the art form of comics. Come and listen to Elftorp talk about his long and varied carreer, during which he has, among other things, established CBK (C’est Bon Kultur), Tusen Serier, Hybriden, AltCom, Fanzineverkstaden and so on.
I have a feeling I’ll want to talk more about the actual contents of my comics (and perhaps the context in which they were created) rather than about myself this time, but yeah, we’ll see what I’ll have to say about all this.
See you there!
A coupld of different deadlines for anthologies I’m involved in have now all been announced, and all are on the same date:
FEB 15, 2027 is the date to keep in mind, for sending comics for
ParaVox #5: ECOCIDE
ParaVox #6: ERASURE
CBA vol 76: WORLD WITHOUT PICTURES – ART ON STRIKE
I ‘ve written about World Without Pictures (the upcoming picture-less issue of CBA) before, but I just wrote a new blog post at the CBK website where I expanded my thoughts on the theme a bit more, so GO CHECK IT OUT.
For ParaVox, you’ll find the SUBMISSION GUIDELINES at the Tusen Serier website, and you can read the theme descriptions here:
ParaVox #5: ECOCIDE
This is about our place in the world we inhabit. What relationship do we, as humans, have to nature, and which alternatives have we forgotten? What does the future look like, considering the depletion of fossil fuels, the handling of nuclear waste and the potential redirection of the Gulf stream, melting ice caps and other things that’ll bring great changes to the climate?
When land, forest, water, minerals and entire eco systems are commodified, what does it even mean to talk about our “relationship” to nature?
What does it do to our collective psyche when environmental destruction is used as method for warfare? Why are the places with the most natural resources so often the same places that pay the highest price for others’ extraction of those resources? Is it possible to have an equal exchange with nature within the logic of ownership? How can we reevaulate our relationship to the planet and the eco systems we are part of? And what can we do when the energy lamps and the paper straws don’t lessen the effects of the overproduction of global corporations and the datacenters of tech giants?
Deadline: Feb 15, 2027
ParaVox #6: ERASURE
Making deals with a counterpart who doesn’t see you as fully human is doomed to fail because they will only respect their end of the bargain while it suits them. It’s how colonial powers have acted throughout history and it’s still repeating today, but it doesn’t end there. The same mechanisms also come with erasure.
Who is erased from history and who gets to be remembered? What happens to a people’s collective memory when their names are distorted, the names of their places are exchanged or appropriated? When literary archives are destroyed, when ruins and monuments are bombed or demolished?
What happens to a people’s potential for resistance struggle when the its conditions are transformed and redefined? What choices are left? After decades of decolonization, there’s still work to be done: to preserve, recreate and rebuild your culture, to make paths for freedom beyond the dehumanization logic of oppression…
Give us your comics & texts about this subject, preferably from colonized/decolonized perspectives. Discuss the colonial mechanisms, what’s been lost, what remains and what can be restored. What ways can be used to abolish the lingering and pervasive imperial/colonial mindset before it destroys us?
Deadline: Feb 15, 2027
I repeat: go to Tusen Serier for the SUBMISSION GUIDELINES for ParaVox.
I very much look forward to all the comics that’ll come in for all these issues.
We’re having an exhibition together with Malmö Culture Collective this upcoming weekend, which is Malmö Gallerihelg. You’ll find us at Café Myka (Friisgatan 12).
See art by Layal Safieddine, Kinga Dukaj and Mattias Elftorp representing ParaVox, together with Sajan Rai (who is also a ParaVox artist), Elise Alexandersson, Ellen Sahlberg, Jose David Cifuentes Ulloa, and Ella Öjebo.
You can read more about our theme: Worldl/Otherworldly and see samples from some of the artists HERE.
For our part of the exhibition, you will find a selection of our prints/zines/books on our walls/tables, and of course all 4 issues of ParaVox. We will also highlight some additional examples from the first issues. Don’t miss it!
I’ll be at Helsinki Comics Festival this weekend (Sep 18-20), for the first time in a couple of years!
We’ll have a Hybriden table together (Wormgod, CBK & Tusen Serier) as usual, and I’ll be on stage on Sunday between 12-12:45 together with Stripburger and Pure Fruit, for a talk with Johanna Rojola about indie comics publishing. It says CBK in the program, but we’ll also talk a bit about Tusen Serier’s ParaVox.
We’ll also do portfolio reviews on Sunday between 15:30-17.
See you there, if you’ll be in Helsinki (and there’s no reason for you not to be)!
Next week in Malmö: Gallerihelgen! But more on that later…
I’m writing this post in the future, because September was too much and I didn’t have time to post about everything that happened and if I don’t, I won’t have a way to remember and if I don’t remember, did it really happen? And if it didn’t happen but I was there but I don’t remember, I feel we’re getting into paradox territory, and it’s bad enough already that I’m writing this in the future, and anyway, here are some things that happened (counting backwards, as if these were separate blog posts):
ParaVox #1-3 exhibition @ Ystad Seriefestival 2026
Ystad Teater, Sep 4-6
Mellan rasistiska lagar och en samtid av folkmord och deportationer är ParaVox en plattform för motståndsröster i serieform. Serieskapare och skribenter från olika länder samlas i denna nya serietidning för att titta på verkligheten och korsa gränsen mellan konst/historieberättande och att vara del av en samhällsutveckling. Aktivism i serieform.
Malmö Seriefest
Folkets Park, Aug 29-30
I was there with Hybriden. This is what it looks like when we (for once) have (almost) as much table space as we need:
In order of appearance: Marie Tillman | CBK | prints | Wormgod | Tusen Serier | Layal Safieddine.
Me and Layal also did a stage interview about ParaVox, and I was also again in the jury for Fanzinepriset.
Check out the winners!
I also missed most of the summer because August was spent putting together the 4th issue of ParaVox, which came out just in time for Helsinki.
ParaVox #4: DISINFORMATION
SUBSCRIBE (4 issues)
Disinformation and misinformation are growing concerns in our time: deliberate politically motivated misdirection, alongside myths being spread in good faith on social media. News media repeating lies from cops and representatives of genocidal states. Search engines as well as academic papers relying on AI to provide answers to questions that previously required thorough research and source criticism.
This issue explores the myths, rumors, and lies that are filling the air around us. From comedic satire to astonishing fallacies to manipulations of apocalyptic proportions.
Do vaccines cause climate change? Are experts autistic? Are white babies being replaced by AI? What is real? Who can we trust? Where is the information society headed, can we also come, and do we want to?
Comics: Mattias Elftorp | Manuel Rodriguez Navarro | Allan Eido | Darren Cullen | [Anonymous] | Bitte Andersson | Gina Nakhle Koller | Layal Safieddine (Urjuen) | Maja Hansson
Texts (with illustrations): Mariana Hernandez | Amr Abbas | Kinga Dukaj
Illustration: 404isak_
Cover: Rubén Hervás
Check out the Tusen Serier blog post for samples.
I ended up having one longer comic, Angry Animal on Replacement Theory & Other Myths…
…and a bunch of shorter things in this issue:
It’s a fine issue, but it’s been intense. Feels good to have a bit of a break until the next one, which is planned for April or May 2027.
And since I’m sending this post back to the middle of September, when you read this, we still think we’re going to have some CBA and ParaVox books at the Gothenburg Book Fair, in the booths Kulturtidskriftsmontern and Seriefrämjandet. What will happen in the following week is that we find out there will be an apologist for Israel’s genocide in the booth of Vänskapsförbundet Sverige – Israel, so we (both ParaVox and CBA) decided to boycot that shit. We asked them to take our books of the shelves and put up this sign instead (and a variation of it for CBA):
Ok, so I think that’s me being pretty much caught up. The time here in the future is approaching 15 and it’s time to get some breakfast.
We got ParaVox #3: SNITCH SOCIETY from the printer the other day, and just like the previous ones, this may be the best one so far!
Beautiful cover by Danijel Žeželj and lots of great material. Some of which you may have seen, by Kinga Dukaj, Layal Safieddine, Julia Nascimento, Shko Askari and Felipe Kolb Bernardes, if you went to see Tusen Serier’s exhibition Angiverisamhällets Baksidor back in 2024, when the Swedish snitch law was just announced.
ORDER THE BOOK from Hybriden
and/or
SUBSCRIBE (4 issues – you can choose which issue to begin with, including back issues, from #1)
Some may think it seems cozy and secure, but it will inevitably affect the innocent, especially when the law is designed precisely to target people whose only crime is to seek a haven in a country they were not born in. That in itself is bad enough. But will it even stop at authorities and public employees reporting undocumented people? Or will it also become a national duty to report those who do not behave “correctly” enough according to some arbitrary nationalist standards? “Lack of conduct” is already a legal reason for deportation as well as for punishing school children. What happens to the public psyche when laws are introduced that will force us to keep an eye on each other, suspect each other and report each other? And above all: what ways are there to refuse and to resist?
There’s also new material by Josef Norén, Darren Cullen, Gianluca Costantini and Allan Eido, and a text by Patricia Lorenzoni.
Some behind-the-scenes/trivia on my contributions:
BUGS was also published in CBA vol 73, but that version was drawn with my left hand, and this one was right-handed. For ParaVox, I also added three pages, full page images where I used the left-handed drawings. I felt the story would benefit from fleshing out the main character a bit more, and I think that was the correct choice. 
Angry Animal About the Dark Side of the Snitch Society was in the exhibition, but I had to update parts of it, since the law was actually passed just before we sent this issue to print. Yeah, the situation here is pretty fucked up, with the right-wing government racing to implement as much as possible of their shit before the election. Their Tidö deal is like a Swedish version of the US Project 2025… I also wrote a bit about the law in my introduction to this issue.
Patricia Lorenzoni’s text, What the asylum movement knows about the rabbit hole, talks about the descent into Fascism, with references to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the Swedish migration policies that the snitch law is part of, and Alice in Wonderland. So I based my illustratio on the illustrations by Sir John Tenniel from the book…
This one isn’t exactly one that I worked on, but Shko Askari’s comic, The Continued Journey of Ibrahim, is sort of a sequel to our book En Andra Chans, with a scene starring one of the main characters of the book.
Check the Tusen Serier blog post for more samples and info on this issue.
I’m going to the CRACK! festival at Forte Prenestino, June 25-28 in Rome!
I’ll be there representing Wormgod, Tusen Serier / ParaVox and CBK / CBA, along with Hybriden and our friends from Cálice Magazine and Ystad Seriefestival.
I’ll have a whole bunch of prints in different sizes, the latest Piracy is Liberation books which haven’t been at this festival yet, and some zines.
For Tusen Serier, we’re bringing the first 2 issues of ParaVox, and a few other Tusen Serier titles.
From CBK, we’re bringing a selection from the CBA issues that’s come out since the last time we were there, including the latest issue, CBA vol 73: BUGS and Julia Nascimento‘s A Perfect Place to Call Home.
And we’re doing an exhibition with various prints, including a series of jam comics we made recently for just this occasion and the festival’s HAPPINESS theme. It’s a mix of Tusen Serier, CBK, Wormgod, together with our friends from Cálice Magazine and Ystad seriefestival.
So there’s a lot going on in the editorial end of my life at the moment.
ParaVox #2 is being printed right now (more on that after it’s released) and we’re soon in the process of making the selection for #3, but we extended the deadline until Jun 9, so there’s still time to send us something on the SNITCH SOCIETY theme. Things are looking good so far, but we still have some empty pages that need filling. And we got a cover for it by Danijel Žeželj, which we’ll announce soon!
See the call for submissions for info on that, and for the next issue (deadline Jul 5): MISINFORMATION.
EDIT: This deadline has been extended to July 20!
The illustrations for both of these calls for submissions were made by Layal Safieddine (Urjuen), who is also one of the editors.
So that’s what’s going on right now with ParaVox.
Meanwhile, CBA also has two calls for submissions. The first one is CBA vol 74|75: APATHY, which is another sign of the times just like the two ParaVox themes are.
The illustration for this one is by Marie Tillman, who is also the main editor of the issue.
See the call for submissions and send us comics, deadline Sep 15.
We also just announced the issue after that, where I’m the main editor, and for which I didn’t do the illustration:
CBA vol 76: WORLD WITHOUT PICTURES – ART ON STRIKE, which will be an entire issue without any pictures:
Both comics artists and illustrators are heavily underpaid. Yet illustrations of all kind, from instruction manuals and pictographs to logotypes and deeply involving visual storytelling, surround us constantly. With this theme, we imagine a world where illustrations are on strike, where what remains is a collection of stories completely devoid of pictures. Let’s see what their absence has to say about our forgotten need, our neglected dependence, for the visual arts.
I’m pretty excited about this one, both as creator and as editor. How do you make a comic with no pictures, without turning it into something other than a comic, where the absence of art is a part of the experience? We’ll see.
Check the call for submissions to see the list of rules for it. Deadline Feb 15, so you have a lot of time to not draw something for it, if you’re so inclined.
And to tie this all together, here’s the cover for ParaVox #2, by Sajan Rai:
Two new anthologies were officially released this weekend.
The one I’ve worked on the most is ParaVox #1: PALESTINE from Tusen Serier. Last fall we put together an editorial group and sent out a call for submissions for the first 4 issues at once (we’re still open for submissions to #3 and 4), and now the first one is finally here!
The plan is to release all four over the summer, so it’s a lot of work but also feels really good. Not least because they all deal with very relevant topics. Far too relevant, even, with Palestine, Snitch Society, Misinformation and the ever-present (Anti)racism.
You can subscribe and you can order the first issue.
I just showed off a page from my comic in a previous blog post, so I’m not going to post that again here, but have a look at the cover, by Anuj Shrestha:
All the money from sales of this first issue go to Senabil Society to support the people of Gaza.
You can read more and see sample of the content here.
I’m now in the process of putting together the second issue, which should be out in time for the CRACK! festival in June.
—
Also just released: CBA vol 73: BUGS
As with ParaVox, you can also subscribe to CBA, and/or just order the issue.
Cover, by Aiden Kvarnström, a new addition to the editorial crew and the main editor of this issue:
You’ll find samples here.
Here’s a page from my comic:
I’ve been having a problem with my right wrist lately, so I decided to draw this one with my left. Due to poor self-preservation skills, I ended up doing it with both, but the one used here is the lefthanded version, which I think gave the linework a nice unhingedness.
Hopefully you’ll be able to also see the righthanded version at some point in the future…
