My books (the only 30 books you need?)

The new issue of CBA is out, where I made the cover and a comic and was main editor. It looks very good in print, if I may say so myself (more about it at the CBK site). I also have a short comic in the next issue, which will also be out soon (Nov 25, with a few sneaky pre-release appearances).

And since we’re talking new releases, maybe it’s time to take stock of the older ones, so I took them out of my shelf and had a little self-celebratory photo session. Remember when Marie Kondo said you only need 30 books? Well, these could be 175 of them (more or less)…

Starting with the main thing: Piracy is Liberation in its various editions, collections and bonus zines:

Other books I’ve written and drawn or, in a few cases, written for someone else to draw, or made as collaborations:

A bunch of smaller scale publications and/or recent(-ish) zines:

Going on with some loose mix of theme/chronology, here’s the early issues of C’est Bon, with some side publications.

Continuing with the early issues after we turned the zine C’est Bon into the international anthology C’est Bon Anthology, and the restart when we got US distribution and started calling them volumes:

More volumes av CBA:

So far I’ve only included issues of CBA where I’m participating with comics, so here are those where I was just part of the editorial crew:

Same category, editorial only but (mostly) for Tusen Serier, though in some cases that includes translations and I also made the over-all design for almost all of these:

As you may have noticed if you looked closely enough at the CBA pics, there was a period when I wasn’t as involved (vols 8-27). It was during that time I started Wormgod and Tusen Serier with other collaborators, and I also edited and sometimes participated in a series called Dystopia:

It was also during that time I started doing the bi-annual AltCom festival, with these accompanying anthologies, until the pandemic put a temporary(?) but long-lasting stop to such social events:

Going back to CBA for an instant, these are the issues where I was main editor. We started doing that starting with vol 35 if I remember right, since it turned out our tastes differed too much within the group. So instead of staying in a situation where someone would always be a little unhappy with the selection (what was included or what was excluded), now we’d take turns setting the theme and having final say about the contents. I think it’s worked pretty well and it’s still how we do it (vol 64 should have been in this pic as well, but it wasn’t out yet when I took the photos). I didn’t make comics for all of these, but I made the covers, except the first one which is a drawing by Radovan Popović, printed only in spot gloss lamination:

Speaking of covers, here are some book covers I’ve made for books I didn’t have much else to do with (except I made a bunch of interior illustrations for two of them and edited one):

And for this trilogy, my main involvement was doing the design:

…in contrast to the following anthologies from different countries, where I only participated with comics (or illustrations, in three or four of them):

This list isn’t 100% complete since I didn’t includes magazines, older zines etc, but other than some things like that, this is pretty much it… I have some more, still uncomfirmed, possible publications that may come out before this year is over, so check this space for more news in the near future.

Oh, and if you’re interested, you can get most of these at Hybriden.

RPGs…

I did something new last weekend. Or new to me, at least: I was at an event called Death By Die, where I tried playing my first miniature wargame.

But I guess this story started almost 40 years ago…

I used to play a bunch of Role Playing Games back in the 1990s. Always tabletop, never live action. Actually, I started even earlier, because me and some of my classmates got the opportunity to do it on the school’s budget when I was in 5th(?) grade, so we got the Star Wars RPG, Lord of the Rings and Mutant (a Swedish postapocalyptic cyberpunk game), if I remember it right. Maybe also Drakar & Demoner (D&D), the Swedish version of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). I think those were what was available at the time in Varberg, where I lived at the time. At least I think that’s what happened, but we got to keep the games afterwards so I’m not sure. Maybe the school just let us have them? It was kind of a different time…

Before that, in the late 1980s when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I had played some game books. Mostly the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever (illustrated, as it turns out, by Gary Gygax, the creator of DnD). They were books written in the second person, where the reader was the protagonist and you’d read a few paragraphs or pages at a time, then you’d choose what would happen next, i.e what page to comtinue the story on. You had a little character sheet in the end of the books where you’d keep track of things you got and how you progressed through the story. There was even a system for combat and skill checks, based on a simple random number generator: a page with a bunch of numbers on it and you had to put your finger somewhere with your eyes closed to see what you got (or you could use a D10 if you had one of those).

I mostly borrowed the books from a friend, who sometimes read them to me and I had to just listen and make the choices, almost like a real RPG. This was also the same person who later got me into the Dune books, which I’m currently re-reading (Heretics of Dune at the moment). It was fun, and often pretty difficult. I only managed to actually succeed in a couple of those books without dying or losing in some other way.

We used to spend recesses at school writing our own gamebooks in our glossary books (instead of using them to practice English or handwriting or whatever they were meant for). So I guess I actually wrote my first (still unpublished) book when I was 9 or 10. A sci fi story called Pang, sa det! (loosely translates as: “It just went Bang”), where you had to fight Hitler the second on Earth II… It may not have been great literature, but it was a complete story and a fully functional gamebook. I still have it lying around somewhere. Having done that back then is probably what made me do something similar in comics form, 22 years later, with Piracy is Liberation 010: Hypertext Consciousness (and some of the later Piracy books as well). I wanted to have a pic of Pang, sa det! beside Piracy010, but I couldn’t find it right now…

But anyway, in high school in the 90s I picked it up again, playing a bunch of different games, like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun and various World of Darkness games, such as Werewolf: the Apocalype and Wraith: the Oblivion which was the one I was Storyteller for (the WoD word for Game Master). And I tried creating my own RPG called Wormholes, set in an adjacent world to the comic zines I was making at the time, possibly the same world as Pang, sa det! (I was reading too much comics not to make it an interconnected multiverse). Maybe I’ll write more about all that at some point, if/when I finish the Piracy RPG…

We also played a few Collectible Card Games. The first two that reached Varberg were Magic the Gathering (which we never got into) and Doomtrooper (the one we started playing). I always lost because those games were often designed so that whoever could afford to get the most cards would be able to build the best deck and would always win, and that wasn’t me. We also tried Mythos, the Lovecraft-based CCG, and Rage. Rage I still think was the best of them. It was based on Werewolf: the Apocalypse and the system favored strategic thinking and an optimized deck, which meant that you could actually do pretty well even if you didn’t have the most cards. I tried playing it again a few years ago and it actually still holds up.

My -90s gaming days were followed by two decades where I didn’t play any RPGs at all, but I’ve been getting back into it. I now have one group where I play with Dice Dominion and Trauma Command (the other half of Wormgod) with Factory Farming as Storyteller, where we’re playing a long-running World of Darkness campaign. With a side quest in Kult that tied into the Werewolf story. I also have another group where my brother runs mostly Call of Cthulhu sessions.

Old and new dice…

Getting back to my original point: I’ve never had a lot of money, so the CCGs were bad enough. Playing miniature wargames back in those days would have been impossible, because those miniatures are expensive. I also don’t have the patience or fine motor skills to paint them. So I never even tried it, until now.

If you’re unfamiliar, miniature wargames are basically advanced strategy board games with RPG elements mixed in. DnD has always included something similar when it comes to combat, but you can play most RPGs using just theatre of the mind so the board game part of it is pretty much optional. Games like Warhammer 40 000 (which I’ve never tried nor even seen played, so I’m doing some educated guesswork here) do it the other way around. They’re set in a world with chracters and storylines, but all of that is more or less optional and the main part is the strategic minature warplay.

So a while ago, Anton Heed who has some zines in Fosfor and who is also a member of our collective workshop, Fanzineverkstaden, came to print out the rules and worldbuilding documents for his game, Muterad Medeltid i Europas Ruiner (Mutated Middle Ages in the Ruins of Europe). He told me about it and it seemed interesting. Long story short, I ended up at the Death By Die fest with Kinga, who was there to sell dice as Dice Dominion. And it was fun! I played 2 games in that setting and even won the first bout, though it didn’t feel like it was about winning. It was more like how I described it, an RPG focusing mostly on the startegic warplay.

My days are mostly about much the same things. No matter if I’m doing administrative work or design or project management for exhibitions or even actually writing and drawing, it all revolves in one way or another around things related to comics or art or comics art. That’s a complete simplification, but let’s say it’s all about storytelling, and even if Muterad Medeltid was also about storytelling, it still felt a lot like something new, and I liked that feeling.


There. I was just going to say something about having been to Death by Die and then it grew into an autobiography about my history with RPGs. Now I’m going to have some breakfast, then go to the post office to pick up my copy of Aphex Twin‘s reissue of the Selected Ambient Works II vinyl, and then I’m going to get some work done, or take the day off and read some Dune, because I haven’t had enough rest for the last few weeks and I’m soon entering another period of too many things at once, and I’m still digesting Hokage (Shinya Tsukamoto‘s laest movie) that I watched last night…

Probability Drive at Seriefest 2024

I made a new book!

Originally made for CBA vol 64: THE BOX (which goes to print soon), but steered in a slightly different direction since it kind of amalgamated with another project that finally got off the ground this summer: a cooperation with Finnish guitar makers Ruokangas Guitars that I will talk more about later when it’s more official.

It’s called PROBABILITY DRIVE: a space operette and will be available at Seriefest this weekend, the Malmö-based zine festival this is currently organized by the Seriefest group in cooperation with Tusen Serier. After the festival, it’ll soon be made available from Wormgod at the Hybriden webshop.

The ELUSIVE UTOPIA has a crew of three:
Astrid, Sol and the Cat, each with their own secrets.
On its way to the human colony of New Haven,
they run into a problem.
Their Shrödingerian Probability Drive has stopped
working, and they have important cargo for the colony.

They may need to open the box…

It’s kind of a serious comedy multi-levelled short story in space, printed at Fanzineverkstaden.

I’ll be at Seriefest with Wormgod/Tusen Serier/CBK this weekend, so see you there!

If you missed it…

I took down the Piracy013 release exhibition a while ago, but I did take photos this time! So for those who missed it during its limited opening hours, here are photos, including the trivia signs that accompanied some of the prints.

Wall #1

Close-ups:

Translaton text 1:
I tried to turn the chapter with the artificially intelligent missiles into a sort of life cycle, where they go through different stages, including one where they have a love relationship with each other and one where they start doubting their purpose. In the end they decide to continue on the path they started, accepting that it can only end in one way.

Translation text 2:
Inspired by eye witness descriptions from a comic creator in New York City, talking about how in the start of the US war against Iraq and Afghanistan, recruitment drives were specifically aimed at neighborhoods mostly populated by poor and/or non-white people.

Wall #2:

Close-ups:

Translaton text 1:
A terrorist camp out in the Desert. But who are the terrorists and why are they so miserable?

Translation text 2:
Metamagic: based on the practitioner being aware that they are actually characters in a comic, which means they can use this magic to travel in time by moving outside the comic pages. Among other things…

Translation text 3:
Metamagic can also be used to learn how to fly.

Translation text 4:
Erica’s daughter and her friend, Emily and Tomorrow, tried out the Lemonade the grown-ups are drinking. It’s a hallucinogen extracted from the blood of dead gods. It’s also a dramaturgic aid that facilitates the understanding and learning of Metamagic. It’s just not really meant to be taken by kids…

Translation text 5: I like when characters who are actually enemies are put in a situation where open conflict isn’t necessarily an option. During a bomb raid, I had four of the main (and not so main) characters end up in a bomb shelter together. Mostly to see what would happen:
-Erica, wounded after events in the Desert.
-Rain. who is more of a hangaround in the anarchist social circles.
-Jowe, who switched unions because he felt that the anarchosyndicalists were too critical against the war effort, and that they didn’t condemn the accused (bu unconfirmed) terrorists harshly enough.
-Fist, part of the fascist group, but not as enthusiastic as his friends when it comes to actually entering the war.
This was also inspired by real stories about how people who wouldn’t normally hang out can be forced together by circumstances created by the war.

Wanna know what happens next? You’re gonna have to read the book for that.

Wall #3:

This one is the bonus material, with various prints I’ve made. Not really connected to Piracy is Liberation.

Livets Låga Slocknar, finally!

Yesterday, I got a package I’d ordered through Discogs. It’s a vinyl 7″ EP I made a cover illustration for, a little over 20 years ago, that I’d never seen irl before.

Actually, I didn’t make the image for them, but I offered that they could use something I’d already made. I suggested this for the cover:

but in the end they used this (not made by me):

They did, however, use one of mine for the inside cover. This one, which I originally made for the 2002 CBK exhibition »ACETON (CH3COCH3)«:

I’m pretty sure they sent me a copy back when, but I never managed to get it, for some confused reason. So this, 20+ years later, is the first time I actually see it and finally have it among my other records.

EDIT: Actually, it seems I made some more suggestions for the cover, which I just found while looking through some old files. So here are three cover suggestions, of which I already showed one, and I think two had potential, but none of them were used:

Angry Animal about a Genocide

Since Israel’s genocide never seems to end, and they keep rhetorically blaming the victims, and the rest of the world seems determined to let it continue (by which I mean especially one nation (and its allies) with huge influence over world politics, you know the one, who views international law as only applicable when it suits them), it felt like it was time to make an English translation of this comic. The Swedish version was made for the Rum för Frihet exhibition in Malmö during Eurovision week. It was later published in Proletären #24/2024. I don’t have a lot of influence over world politics, but I can at least do what I’m good at to try to help counteract the pro-genocide propaganda…

Feel free to share this to anyone who needs to read it.

 

Opening hours!

If you’re in Malmö and couldn’t make it to the Piracy 013 exhibition opening, you still have the chance to see it. I will keep the exhibition open on these times:

Thursday (Jun 20): 17-20
Tuesday (Jun 25): 17-20
Thursday (Jun 27): 17-20

Drop by and hang out for a while! Take the opportunity to get the whole set of the first 13 Piracy is Liberation books (or the books you’re missing).
Both the single issues and the thick collected editions will be available.You can follow this trip of 20 years of my life as a comics creator (ok, there was a 10 year break between books 011 and 012, but I hope you can see some evolution in my writing/drawing skills during that gap anyway).

There will also be some classic Wormgod prints available in varying sizes, in case you have some empty wall space you need filling.

Or just come and see some pages from the latest book, printed in large format, with some trivia/behind the scenes comments added.

The Finkelstein/Rabbani/Morris/Destiny debate…

 

So I watched this debate last night and I just have a couple of things to comment on it (my comments will be clear if you watch the video first, so you should do that. It’s just 5 hours):

-When the ”it’s not a genocide” side says that international law doesn’t matter, they of course mean that it doesn’t matter to Israel, because it doesn’t matter to the US, because they’re both already criminals and until they can be held accountable they will continue to be. By which it logically follows that if Hamas had only claimed on Oct 7th that the IDF was hiding behind civilians, they could have murdered at least 35 times as many civilians and it would have counted as self defense.

-You can’t be a super efficient and exact army and murder that many civilians, especially that many children, and not be genocidal. So if you’re not intentionally genocidal, you have to admit that you’re fucking up real bad, and you need to cease fire to find another solution to your problem. It was ”funny” when Morris used the word ”proportionality”, because it’s a lot of bodies since Israel had any credibility in saying that their response is proportional. Of course, that’d require that you care about civilian deaths, which you obviously don’t, which takes us back to an intentional genocide being the most probable answer. And if it’s a genocide, it needs to stop immediately, because it’s a genocide and you’re not supposed to do those.

-And yes, Finkelstein was a bit harsh on Destiny, but he was also right: that moron shouldn’t have been there yapping his motomouth while the grown-ups were talking. And I generally don’t have anything against people being harsh on genocide apologists…

By the way, I do appreciate that they let this discussion take the time it did instead of forcing it into a shorter format. It could have been even longer to make room for decades of checkpoints, incarcerations, demolished homes, stolen homes and other abuses to give more context, but still… It’s a pretty good, if frustrating, debate.

Piracy013 RELEASE event & exhibition

When: June 14 at 18-21 (the exhibition lasts until Jun 28)
Where: Rum för Serier (Friisgatan 12, Malmö)
What: Book release with comics exhibition
Opening hours:
Thursday (Jun 20): 17-20
Tuesday (Jun 25): 17-20
Thursday (Jun 27): 17-20

This was supposed to happen on June 7, but had to be postponed due to illness…

Piracy is Liberation 013: Missile Crisis is the latest part of my cyberpunk postapocalypse epic.

The City is firing sentient smart-missiles against terrorists hiding in the previously unknown desert. But who is this outer enemy?
Using metamagic, Purple learns how to fly and takes Information and Erica on an expedition to find out, but the truth comes with unexpected dangers.
Piracy is Liberation is a mix of classic cyberpunk elements in a dystopian future with a glimmer of postapocalyptic hope and a pinch of metamagic.

The story, which started in book 012, is a comment on the increasingly war-hungry media climate. It takes place far into the future, in a city where Capitalism is the only remaining religion, where the people don’t know that anything exists outside the City (until now) or that things have ever been different.

We invite you to an exhibition with material from the book along with some more stuff, new and old.
Haven’t read the earlier books in the series? Don’t worry, they’ll all be available at a special price.
Come and hang out, look at the pretty pictures, buy the pretty book and have some wine, it’ll be great!
We’ll keep going until 21 unless we decide to stay longer…


The exhibition is presented by Wormgod & CBK in cooperation with the Swedish Comics Association. This is the final(?) step on my release tour.

Feel free to share and invite people to the Facebook event.

SIS 2024

This weekend in Stockholm: SIS (Stockholm International Comics Festival), the second step on my release tour for Piracy is Liberation 013: Missile Crisis!

I’ll bring all the Piracy is Liberation books to the Wormgod table, some Angry Animals, including a brand new zine I made of my Arg Kanin om ett folkmord that I made for the Rum för Frihet exhibition, and a bunch of prints/posters.

I’ll be sharing a group of tables with CBK, Tusen Serier and Dice Dominion, so there’ll be a whole lot of stuff (books, prints, dice).

See you there!