Getting closer…

I just drew the first page of the last chapter of Piracy is Liberation 013: Missile Crisis.

In total, this book is going to be about 228 pages and I haven’t checked, but I think that during this book I’ve passed the 1000 page mark of Piracy is Liberation as a whole!

I just re-read what I’ve done so far, to check that I’m on the right track, and the book’s shaping up to be pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the page, sans text to avoid spoiling anything, but at least you get to see the chapter title:

Inktober Piracy…

For the first time, I actually managed to stay disciplined enough to post a new drawing each day during October. I cheated of course, posting stuff I didn’t make for that day, but who can stay interested enough in Instagram for that long unless you cheat (I know people like it and that’s ok, I just can’t make myself do the same)?

Anyway, here are some of the pics:

And one that I never used:

New stuff at Magasinet Konkret

My newspeak dictionary, which I first made for CBA vol 58 (also included in the (Anti)rasism exhibition last year) and have since translated and expanded a bit, is now up at Magasinet Konkret.

It’s an attempt to figure out the new meanings of words after some years of degradation and erosion where some words now seem to mean the opposite of what they used to and some simply don’t really mean anything anymore. At least if you are to trust how the words are used in the news and on social media…

Magasinet Konkret is publishing one word/day on their start page, with a link to the complete list. I like that this gets some attention, since CBA often goes under the radar for a lot of people.

Seriefest i Väst & Fijuk + Tank Girl

There are a few things happening this week…

Tonight, starting at 1930, I’ll be at Hypnos Theatre in Malmö (Norra Grängesbergsgatan 15). I was invited by the Swedish Comics Association to talk about the postapocalypse of Piracy is Liberation, and probably a bit about After the Ends of the World and The Troll as well, as an introduction to Film i Malmö‘s screening of the 1995 Tank Girl movie.
Facebook event (it’s free but you need to become a member of Film i Malmö, see info in the event)

And this weekend I’ll be in Gothenburg for Seriefest i Väst and Fijuk @ Longest Night. It’ll be me and Leviathan from CBK and we’ll also have books from Tusen Serier and Wormgod. Here’s the schedule:

Friday (Oct 27)
17-23 at Frilagret (Heurlins plats 1, near Järntorget): the Seriefest i Väst market. Facebook event

Saturday (Oct 28)
11-18 at Frilagret (Heurlins plats 1, near Järntorget): the Seriefest i Väst market. Facebook event
15-23 at Longest Night (Dagjämningsgatan 14, Kortedala industriområde): Fijuk market + live music: Facenag (Sthlm) and Kadonnut Manner (Rovaniemi). Facebook event

See you there!

Edit: I missed the Fijuk because I finally got Covid and had to go home. 2 weeks later I’m almost all right again, just tired…

Contradictory views

Another illustration I made for Magasinet Konkret a while ago.

The text is about how the far right in the US has two images of Sweden that serve to present us as both a role model and an example of how bad things can get. None of which are true. We’re neither the heroes who successfully ignored COVID nor overrun by queers and foreign criminals. We’re not even a Socialist paradise. Which any thinking person could figure out, but truth went out the window a long time ago in this stupid propaganda war…

We’re just as Capitalist as any other country, complete with racist migration policies and everything, even if we don’t currently shoot queers in the streets and we still have some sensible things like public health care etc, but who knows how long that’ll last…

Anyway, here’s the article, by Lisa Bjurvald (it’s in Swedish and you need to subscribe, but if you know the language, this is a subscription you should get anyway).

Seriefest 2023

This weekend (Sep 2-3) it’s Seriefest in Malmö (in Ridhuset, Folkts Park).

We’ll be there with a selection of books, along with Tusen Serier/Wormgod/Hybriden (the policy is to only sell things made by creators who is present. Luckily, Mattias Elftorp will be there and he’s been involved in lots of books)…

There will also be 2 Hybriden-related items in the program:

Tusen Serier: Jorge Varas Varilla
(Saturday 1630-1650)
Jorge Varas Varilla from Tusen Serier talks about his career as a satire illustrator and how graphic humor was used as a tool for wishing for social change in the 1960s Chile. He tells about Allende’s government, about the military coup and also about his own arrest and exile.
www.varilla.se

CBK/Wormgod: Mattias Elftorp
(Sunday 1300-1320)
Talk with Mattias Elftorp about the international comics anthology CBA and about the cyberpunk postapocalypse of his Piracy is Liberation. War mania in a future where Capitalism is the only religion.
www.elftorp.com

See you there!

Coming soon(ish)

I’m now 53 pages into the story, so still a bit left but it feels good!


EDIT (a week or so later): I’m now thinking of maybe moving some chapters around, which would basically dividing this book into two. But we’ll see.

This is the exciting part of writing things more or less on the fly, especially when each book is part of a larger story. You’re never completely sure what’s going to happen. I mean it’ll all fit together and make sense in the end, but what script I do have isn’t so strict that there’s no room for changes depending on what will, in the end, be the best reading experience (I guess you’ll be the final judge on that when you read it). Anyway, nothing set in stone yet. I had some interesting ideas yesterday, so I’ll try to fot them into the over all plotline. I’m sure it’ll be fine 🙂

Comic in Portal #5

I have a comic in the new issue of Portal, an anthology comic book from The Swedish Comics Association.

There’s a release event for it tomorrow (June 30), with an exhibition of risoprinted pages from the issue, at Rum för Serier (Friisgatan 12, Malmö) between 17-20.

My comic, I förhörsrummet, is an excerpt from Piracy is Liberation 012, but rewritten into a self-contained new story, colored and translated to Swedish (a B/W version in English was published in CBA vol 58 last year). I liked how the colors turned out.

Here are some of the panels from the comic:

See you at the release!

Piracy 005-008 digital comics!

I recently put up another batch of digital Piracy is Liberation books for download at Hybriden.

Sometime within a year I plan to also make book 009-011 available like this, and a year after that books 012-013. In other updates, I’ve finished the first few pages of Piracy is Liberation 013: War and Pieces, which will hopefully be out by the end of this year, possibly beginning of 2024. But more on that later…

What happens when the rules have suddenly changed and the police can do nothing but watch as people party in the streets? What happens when even the rules of reality can be broken? One section of the City where Capitalism is the only religion has been freed from the influence of landlords and indoctrinating television, but when the authorities come back with a vengeance to evict the Free Section, expect violence.
Meanwhile, something is moving on the net. Some kind of entities seem to be interfering with its users. What are these Spiders and how will they affect the plans for the Information Upgrade that the anarchists are planning?
Also in this collection:
Can Technograph change the past through timetravel?
And introducing Ming, the open source web-based sentient being.
Political theory, filtered through autobiography masked as fiction, in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse.
320 pgs
Name your price (minimum 72 sek)

This is a collection of four more books of the Piracy is Liberation series, in digital versions based on the original publications. They are downloadable as a CBR file, a classic format for filesharing comics. You can open it in various comics reader apps, or just a regular unZIP or unRAR app.
Digital comics should be much cheaper than paper books, so it’s a “name your price” deal, with a minimum price based on page count.


Digital download bundle of books 001-004 is of course also still available:

Cyberpunk stories in a future where Capitalism is the only religion, where only sinners disobey and nobody loves a sinner. Pirate is one of those sinners, downloading illegal information straight into his mind to get high. When he gets caught while trying to free Information, he has to use all his skills as a 4-dimensional hacker to break them out of digital prison.
One year later, he’s part of a group trying to free sections of the City from the clutches of brainwashing television, riot cops and the Priests and Masters who control everything.
Meanwhile, Erica toils away as a Slave in the factory. But what’s the dark secret behind the cogs and wheels and levers of her machine? What hides in the desert that no one knows exists? And what of the Drivers and their upcoming strike?
Political theory, filtered through autobiography masked as fiction, in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse.
266 pgs
Name your price (minimum 60 sek)

 

 

Kindred review (Octavia E Butler)

Ok, so, Octavia E Butler… Lately I’ve been reading her Patternist series, and now I’m reading Kindred and it’s touching me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. The other night when I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep because of anxiety over what was going to happen with one of the characters (I won’t spoil anything, but I had stopped reading at page 185 of the 2023 Headline edition, for anyone who knows). And now I just came out of a 2 hour bath because I couldn’t figure out how to stop reading it to get out of the tub. I have 20 pages left, and fuck Disney+ completely if their adaptation isn’t a good one!

The above was written a few days ago. I’ve since finished the book and seen [enough of] the TV version and here’s what I think:

They’ve made some weird choices.

Right from the start, with the choice of the opening scene, it feels like they were going to set this up as a long-running series instead of the finished story it should have been. That feeling seems to have been correct, considering the first season is an unfinished story of 8 episodes, which would have continued if it hadn’t been cancelled.

I’m trying not to spoil anything of the book (I don’t care as much about the TV series), so I won’t go into details, but…

Hang on. My comments on the TV series are kind of meant for people who read the book and are trying to decide if they should try the TV version, but let me be a bit user-friendly and start by introducing the story a little bit.

It’s a time-travel story. 26-year-old Dana goes back in time to save the life of Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner. It gets complicated since Dana is black and Rufus’ family owns slaves and black people need paperwork to prove they’re not slaves. Dana’s husband is a bit older and white and also goes back with her some of the time. I’m not even sure I’m going to say much more about the story itself, you should just read it, but as you can imagine it deals with a lot of complications. It has a clear perspective on power-relations while at the same time blaming the times rather than necessarily the people who live in them. By which I mean that all the characters in the book are believable and have motivations that can be understood (if not sympathized with), even when they act monstrously. The book also does something that feels far too unique, which is treating everyone, from slaves to slave-holders, as people. It feels like most of the time when this period of US history is depicted, black people are portrayed as victims only, with little to no agency. Or their agency is almost exclusively defined in relation to white people (actually, don’t quote me on this. I haven’t done any thorough research with statistics or anything. It’s more of a feeling I got when reading Kindred, that this was something that’s often been missed). And, as I mentioned in the beginning, Butler has a way with storytelling that I have a hard time defining with any word other than captivating.

So with that said, here are some more thoughts on the TV series:

Some of the choices I can kind of see how they could have made them work. Like having Dana be an aspiring TV writer rather than a novelist. Having her want to write things like he favorite show Dynasty feels a bit infantilizing, however. It could have made sense for an adaptation. If done right. But no.

Some were just bad choices, probably meant to make things more exciting but instead rendering some important points in the book impossible to transfer to the screen. For example, Kevin isn’t her husband and fellow novelist, but some musician guy she just started dating, by which I mean that their first date ends with both of them visiting Maryland of 1815. And there are some discussions they have in the book about their experiences, which really need to be between two people who have a long-standing relationship, not two persons who just met and hardly know each other. But I guess it’s supposed to be more exciting if they can get to know each other under these extreme circumstances? Or maybe it’d be too controversial to have an interracial married couple in a 2022 TV series (but not a 1979 book)?

They’ve preserved some scenes from the book, but put them in a weird order in a way that takes away what could have been both subtle and/or powerful scenes. Instead we get watered-down versions.

I read a review that said the TV series delt gratuitous in its depictions of the brutality of slavery, with increasing degrees of torture in the episodes I haven’t seen. This also feels wrong to me, because the book managed to get the wrongness of slavery across even without a constant barrage of black people being whipped. That part of it makes it much worse, of course, but it’s also important to remember that even the more benign slaveholders were part of a system that absolutely needed to be abolished.

In general, it kind of felt a bit dumbed-down, which is always a bad sign. I saw the first two episodes (almost). Then I jumped to the 8th to see if it seemed to get better. It didn’t. It’s just as well that it got cancelled, especially if it means someone else can have a proper go at making an adaptation.


Having written a version of the above as a comment on facebook, the app decided to die on me and it blinked what I’d written out of existence. I’m going to end this review of the TV series with the same thing I decided to write in my comment instead:

Stay away from it, it failed.
But also: read the book, for fuck’s sake!