Author: elftorp

ParaVox #3 is here!

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.

 

 

Redigera

CRACK! 2026

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.

 

Calls for submissions (ParaVox + CBA)!

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:

NEW RELEASES: ParaVox & CBA

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…

Palestine-related comics

Several of my comics are being published these days, all related to Palestine. Because Israel just can’t stop making the world a worse place…

This is the first page of Angry Animal on Antisemanticism, which will be in the first issue of the upcoming anthology magazine ParaVox. I’ll write more about that soon, but you can see samples from all of the contents here, and you can pre-order it and/or subscribe at Hybriden.

Also, the first part of my Angry Animal about a Genocide and a Ceasefire (from 2024 and 2025) is now up at Cálice Magazine.

And I made a thing for the Pennor för Palestina weekly newsletter. Not sure when it goes out, but you can check out their Instagram… The concept for their call for submissions was that entries should be made as footnotes, inspired by Fady Joudah‘s poetry collection “[…]”. The title is Arg Kanin om ett raderande (Angry Animal about an erasing). I may make an English version of this as well for future publication.

This is one of my 4 pages:

För en human migrationspolitik

This weekend is national action days for more humane migration policies in Sweden. It’s been downhill for a long time, men especially now with the current right-wing government.

Today, in a few hours, there’s a manifestation in Malmö, at Trianeln:

(someone made a graffiti based on my logo for För En Human Migrationspolitik)

Also, last Monday, the LIBE Committee, the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, passed a bill that takes the hunt for undocumented migrants to a whole new level.

If this bill passes, we will basically have ICE in Europe as well, and I don’t know about other countries, but I’m pretty sure our government will be very enthusiastic about it.

The Parliament will vote on the proposal this week. If it passes, methods will be adopted such as raids in private homes (and offices, shelters) and in public places (train stations, buses, airports, roads) in the hunt for undocumented migrants

The proposal also includes increased surveillance and collection/sharing of personal/biometric data, report obligation for public agencies (like Sweden’s snitch law from 2024) and racial profiling.

We’ve seen where this leads. ICE has been around for decades, but this proposal feels more like their recent escalation under Trump, where they’ve shot and killed many more than just the few white people who made the biggest headlines, and others have simply disappered after being sent to the US concentration camps.

We already have Frontex and the detention centres. That’s bad enough, we should go in the opposite direction, not take after the nation that was the inspiration for the Nazi segregation policies.

The above information about LIBE’s proposal comes from Civil Rights Defenders.

The guitar project

As you know, in 2024 I published a short sci fi story called Probability Drive (in Swedish, from CBK in 2025, as Sannolikhetsdrift).

What you may not know is that it’s connected to a project I did with Ruokangas Guitars, where I made a painting on a guitar body for their Art Infused guitar collection. They then added some details and built the actual guitar.

The comic actually came from the painting rather than the other way around, in combination with an old idea I had about a spaceship going faster than light using the probability energy of a Schrödinger box with a cat that’s either dead or alive. It’s a complete distortion of the concept of course, and has nothing to do with any real quantum mechanics, but that’s what sci fi and comics are for, right? To play around with ideas and see where they lead you.

The story was also inspired by Sven Linqvist‘s Utrota Varenda Jävel (Exterminate All the Brutes) and Ursula K LeGuin‘s The Word for World is Forest in that it deals with colonialism, but in space. Read the book (mine or theirs) to find out what that means…

Anyway, I must say that the guitar ended up fucking awesome and I would want it for myself except I’d much more prefer if it ended up with someone who can acually play it 🙂

(some of the photos were taken by me during the painting process, the rest are from the Ruokangas website where you can see them in better quality)

 

ParaVox #2 call for submissions: (ANTI)RACISM

We’re now in the process of finishing the selection for ParaVox #1: PALESTINE (the new anthology magazine from Tusen Serier), but we also want comics and texts for the next issue!

ParaVox #2: (ANTI)RACISM

Long ago, European countries propagated the notion of white supremacy, of how other races would inevitably perish to make room for the (Western) European peoples. Today, race is mostly not talked about openly in that way, but the same notions live on and thrive in many circles, even if expressed in other ways. These days there’s talk of culture, religion and criminality, but there is always an implied image of who has an obvious right to a space and who must always justify our existence, be grateful, obedient and assimilated. Racism is not just about how we look at each other on the streets or at work, but also about how our lives are concretely affected by legislation around migration, discrimination, behavior and culture. 

We want comics and texts looking at the phenomena of racism and antiracism from different angles, bringing personal experiences, theoretical reasoning, and visual interpretations.
Deadline: Apr 5, 2026

About the image:
An activist in Sweden recently left a basket or apples painted with the face of Hitler outside the home of Johan Forssell, the Swedish minister of migration, as a protest against Sweden’s support for the Syrian government (with ties to Al Qaida), which in practice financially supports their current attack on the Kurdish areas. The deal was made to facilitate deportations of asylum seekers from Sweden to Syria. The apples were a symbol for the apple not falling far from the tree, since it was revealed that Forssell’s son was active in a Nazi orgnaisation.

Submission guidelines with all the info you need is available in our call for submissions for #1-4.

About ParaVox / Statement of Purpose 

WEIRD FOREST

CBA vol 72: WEIRD FOREST is out soon! This is the latest issue I’ve done work on as main editor, and it’s a good one if I may say so. And who’s going to stop me?

So we didn’t make an open call for this issue, because we had some material from earlier that hadn’t fit into previous issues. So WEIRD FOREST is actually a theme constructed to work for those comics. And then I headhunted a couple more artists I liked that I thought would fit for the issue.

And I made a comic myself, because a story came to me and I had these photos of the woods just next to Angered from an earlier project, and I thought it all fit together.

Here’s a small sample:

It’s set up as a dialogue between three persons (does that make it a trialogue?) but you don’t see any of them, you just hear them talking. So it’s the opposite of the talking head-comic I’ve made for CBA vol 73 (more about that later because I don’t even know if it’ll be accepted). Maybe influenced by me currently writing a (non-comics) book (more on that later as well)?

I also wrote a text, which deals with the Dark Forest theory of why aliens haven’t contacted us (as far as we know), as presented by Cixin Liu in his 3 Body book series, and why I think he may be wrong.

And I made the cover, which is a photoI took in the woods just next to the school where I studied art, outside Skellefteå in the winter of 1998 (possibly 1997). I developed it myself in the school’s phot lab and I’ve always liked it but never used it for anything until now. It’s of course modified and mixed with some ink splotches and a scanned circuitboard (also found around that time, in a dump in Skellefteå, but this one I’ve used for a lot of things since then).

Here’s a scan of the original photo:

The official release date is March 3, when it’ll be available at hybriden.se and the usual retailers and online bookstores. If you order it now from Hybriden, you will get the book around the release date.

CBA vol 72: WEIRD FOREST
116 color pages
ISBN: 978-91-87825-45-3

You have entered into the weird forest. You are one of its creatures now. Welcome. You will never leave. The only path laid out before you, your only choice, is to go deeper, deeper, until you are completely and utterly lost. Not until then can you find who you are and where you’re going.

If you’re lucky.

Comics by: Tomasz Kontny [PL] & Tomxyz [PL], Mattias Elftorp [SE], Michael Elton Crye [US], Athanasía Aarniosuo [FI], Knut Larsson [SE], Susanne Johansson [SE], Svalan Sörblom [SE], Xico Santos [PT/SE]. Text & illustration by: Mattias Elftorp [SE]. Cover & main editors: Mattias Elftorp [SE].

Go to the CBK website to see sample images from all the comics at the .