Fanzineverkstaden – A Subtle Fuck You

Things happening in the near future…

Busy weeks coming up…

Seriefest i Väst @ Litteraturhuset (Lagerhuset, Heurlins plats 1B, Gothenburg)
During the entire festival, I believe I will have a comic in the official exhibition at Litteraturhuset. I can’t show it here yet because I also entered it into the festival’s competition.
Oct 24, 11:15-12: I’ll be part of a panel discussing the importance of cultural magazines for comics. I’ll be there because I’m one of the editors of the cultural magazine/international comics anthology CBA. We’re in a situation now where all the public culture budgets are being cut, because the current government hates culture because they think the voting population will lean more towards the right wing if the cultural supply is made more narrowly mainstream, profit-oriented and/or nationalist. They may be partially correct, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in the long run.
Oct 26, 10-18: Comics market where I’ll be selling books from Wormgod, CBK and Tusen Serier.

Which will overlap a bit with:

FIJUK @ Longest Night (Dagjämningsgatan 14 i Kortedala Industriområde)
Oct 26, 15-23: Fijuk with market & concerts, where I’ll be selling books from Wormgod, CBK and Tusen Serier, possibly with prints and more books than at Seriefest i Väst since the tables are usually bigger. We’ll see how we’ll solve the overlap between the two markets, but there’ll be two of us in Gothenburg so we’ll find a way.

Tusen Serier exhibition: Angiverisamhällets Baksidor
@ Panora/Fish Tank Gallery (Friisgatan 19D, Malmö)
Nov 1, 18-21: Comics exhibition with artists invited by Tusen Serier: Bekim Gaši, Julia Nascimento, Shko Askari, Jayal Safieddine, Alexis Bågenholm, Kinga Dukaj and me. It’s about the proposed new snitch law in Sweden, which is meant to force public employees to snitch on anyone they come in contact with who they suspect to be undocumented. Anyone could figure out it’s a really bad idea for a law, but the government seems to choose not to.
Here’s a sneak peek at two panels from my contribution:
And the poster:

CBK exhibition: KOLAŻ | THE BOX @ Malmö Stadsbibliotek
Release exhibition for the new CBA vol 64: THE BOX & CBA vol 65: KOLAŻ. I was main editor and made the cover for THE BOX. I have comics in both of them. The exhibition will showcase samples of everything that’s in the books.
Here are samples:
And the poster:

Comic Artist of the Month @ Rum för Serier
I’m comic artist of the month in October/November (starting Oct 17) at Rum för Serier, Which happens because I’m part of Serieförmedlingen, the portfolio site of the Swedish Comics Association. So not as fancy as it may sound, but it’s a small solo exhibition of some of my stuff. A selection of sample snippets:

Comic Artists of the Year @ Rum för Serier
I will also be in a group exhibition of everyone who was comic artist of the month during 2024. Later in November(?), I think…

New issues of CBA
CBAvol64 is already out.
CBAvol65 will be officially out Nov 25, but will also be sneakily available as a pre-release at both Seriefest i Väst + Fijuk and of course at the exhibition.
CBAvol66|67 is being produced as you read this. We’re busy making the selection and I’ll be putting it together for a release in December (if possible). Since last year’s issues were so late (half of them released this year), we’re compensating by concentrating all the 2024 issues during the final quarter of the year. Is it healthy? I don’t know. Will it be good? I’m pretty sure it will…

Mitt Möllans julmarknad @ Mitt Möllan, Malmö
Nov 30 + Dec 1: We will hopefully have a table at Mitt Möllan’s christmas market, where we will squeeze in books by Wormgod, CBK and Tusen Serier along with some dice by Dice Dominion and a bunch of prints.
We didn’t get a table, but you can shop your christmas presents online instead.

Tusen Serier exhibition: Fanzineverkstaden @ Rum för Serier
Dec 13: Members of Fanzineverkstaden will exhibit zines and prints and maybe more at Rum för Serier. More details on this later…

I’m sure there will be more happening before the year is over. For example, I just wrote a review of a really boring book, I’m waiting for confirmation on a few publications etc, but this is what I know about so far when it comes to official appearances, exhibitions etc.

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.

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!

Nytt zine: Polisen | Vara Svensk

So I made a zine about a month ago to bring to SIS. It’s two chapters from Me & my Daddy & Zlatan. Probably the two chapters which, when juxtaposed together like this, most clearly point out a certain kind of Swedish self-righteousness and how hollow it can be. It’s a flip zine that stands on its own but also works as a sample of the actual graphic novel.

Polisen|Vara Svensk (The Cops|Being Swedish)
Det här myntet har flera sidor, men oftast är det bara en som syns.
(Translation: This coin has more sides, but most often you can only see one.)

The zine is only available in Swedish for now, but you can get the book in either English of Swedish, all available in the Hybriden webshop:
Polisen|Vara Svensk (the zine)
Me & my Daddy & Zlatan (English)
Jag & min Pappa & Zlatan (Swedish)

Polisen|Vara Svensk is (of course) made at Fanzineverkstaden, published by Tusen Serier.

Comic Strip World Championship launch stream

Last Tuesday, Fanzineverkstaden hosted a video panel introducing the 2021 Comic Strip World Championship.

Harri Filppa and Sami Nyssölä came from Oulu, picking up Mari Ahokoivu and Peter Snejbjerg from Copenhagen on their way to Malmö, and we had a really nice talk in front of the cameras.

The deadline is already over as I post this, but the stream remains. Hope anyone who wanted to join got a chance to do that, and may the best strip creator win!

In case you don’t know…

Mari Ahokoivu was published by CBK a few years back (Find me in this city and a bunch of issues of CBA). She also recently released Oksi, which looks really nice.

Peter Snejbjerg has worked on lots of stuff for DC/Vertigo, such as Starman, Books of Magic, The Dreaming etc, as well as his own Marlene (Mareridt in Danish).

Sami Nyssölä made books like Learn Finnish without studying, 24 days – a Refugee’s Journey (which we have a few copies of for sale, just not in the webshop yet) and most recently Be Finnish Without Suffering.

Harri Filppa is working with the Oulun Sarjakuvakeskus (comics centre) and is one of the main organizers of the Oulu Comics Festival. He’s also made the graphic novel Death Did Us Part.

And of course there’s me…

Hur du gör ett fanzine

As of today, the Arvsfonden project FANZINEVERKSTADEN is officially finished. Fanzineverkstaden itself will live on, more or less in the same form it’s been since it opened (but with less workshops, at least for a while). One of the final things I did as part of the project was this guide for how to put together a zine (only in Swedish so far).

It’s not a basic step-by-step guide for complete beginners so much as it is a list of things that are good to keep in mind to raise the quality of your zine. Or at least avoid some of the pitfalls you might stumble into on the way. Short recommendations for file formats, resolution, technical design issues, distribution etc. Useful things.

Download it here.

The plan is to also make an English version at some point in the near(?) future.

First try at risoprinting

Me and Kinga were invited to represent Fanzineverkstaden at a workshop at MaU (Malmö University) today, as part of their Comics Research Lab project.

First time I tried risoprinting and it went much better than expected. I had thought, based on most risoprinted books etc I’ve seen that the colors would be really pale, but it turned out really nicely. Especially since the print I had prepared was 2 colors on top of each other which created a nice effect and much deeper colors.

I made a variation on my tape cover for Noise Against Fascism / Legion of Swine.

Testprint:

First color:

Second color + combination:

Also made a few copies where I printed yellow as the second color:

This is the one Kinga made:

In case you haven’t seen my original image, this is what it looks like:

2019 pt2/3: collectives

First, here’s a reminder that our big winter sale is still going on at Hybriden, where you can get lots of my stuff really cheap until Jan 1.

Fanzineverkstaden is still going strong. Lots of workshops, members using it for their own self-publishing (you can do it too), lots of administration, planning, meetings, day-to-day work and an ongoing exhibition at Hybriden which will soon be updated with some new stuff.

Managed to squeeze in some time to actually use the equipment myself a few times, as you can see in my last post.

Tusen Serier is still in a low-activity period if you don’t count Fanzineverkstaden. Mostly trying to get by, gearing up for some new projects in the future. But we managed to have an exhibition at the Gothenburg City Library in November, and some other stuff. No new books, though, which I know is what we all really want. But we have a few coming up as soon as we find some money for it, and we have a few exciting international exhibitions in the winter/spring of 2020 that we just got funding for. More on that in the post about the future, coming soon.

CBK is an interesting animal. It makes me tired because I can’t give it as much attention as I think it deserves. At the same time, I’m immensely proud of, and excited about, the upcoming CBA vol 47: Science / Fiction. It’s the last volume of 2019 but will be officially released in January.

I’m the main editor, probably for the last time, and it’s a mix of some returning classic CBA creators, along with some we haven’t published before. All great art, interesting stories etc.

More on this in a separate post, coming soon, but you read more about it and pre-order it here.

I also had some comics published in vol 44 and 46 and drew part of the cover for vol 45.

And we did some exhibitions: Lore, Qtopia and Deep.

Wormgod published one book this year, but it has some great stuff in it. After the ends of the world 2 is a stand-alone follow-up to the first book of the same name. This time, Susanne Johansson made 3 stories about women who were brutally murdered. She wanted to focus on the victims, try to imagine how they ended up where they did, what they might have been thinking. Gruesome stuff, but everything can’t be shallow and well-behaved all the time. This is also a big inspiration for her music as TRAUMA COMMAND.

My stuff in the book is a bit more up-beat. One-image short stories about the different ways the world might end, told from a future perspective after it’s too late. Like I said; up-beat. Because you can read them and remember that it’s not too late yet, as long as we get our shit together. So good luck, us! yaay.

There’s a magnificent soundtrack by SYSTEMET, NIMAM SPREGLEDA, FACTORY FARMING, TRAUMA COMMAND, FEBERDRÖM, KOEFF. If any of these names ring a noisy bell, you’ll have some idea of what to expect.

I also included my time machine story: Why you (maybe) shouldn’t kill Hitler. That’s also a fun story.

You’ve seen some of mine before, so here’s one of Suss‘ pages:

You can order it here.

Speaking of Wormgod and SYSTEMET, we were interviewd in COdA #15. Check it out!

No AltCom this year. No AltCom next year. AltCom the year after that. You’ll see.

I made a map of the whole Hybriden complex, which is where most of my life has taken place creatively for as long as I can remember. Because burn-out affects your memory, haha.

But I’ve also managed to have some time to play/read/watch stuff, as you’ll see in pt3 of my 2019 story. Coming right up…

CRACK! 2019 + some recent stuff

I’m soon going on vacation, this weird concept that you get when you have employment, where you spend some time not working at all. Employment is rare for me, so it still feels like some kind of novelty. And it won’t be completely without work since we have a CBA release/exhibition on July19 (work being defined as when you do things with a purpose other than pleasure/relaxation, not to be confused with employment where you also get paid).

So I thought I should make some small summation of what I’ve beem doing lately. I should say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ since most of what I do is done in the context of one or more of the collectives I’m part of within the Hybriden constellation…

—

Let’s start at the chronological end, with this year’s CRACK! festival (June 20-23) where I was with Kinga Dukaj and Luddvig Melin to represent AltCom/Hybriden/Wormgod/CBK/Tusen Serier and ourselves as artists. If you don’t know, this is one that I’ve been going to every year for the last decade or so, except last year. Which was probably good, because this time it felt better than it has for a while. Less people than usual, but I got some of that magic back, where you meet new people who do interesting stuff, old friends that you only see once or a few times a year (depending on which festivals you go to) who also do interesting stuff, you see lots of cool art, you make some yourself, you’re in this small piece of a possible future/squat paradise on earth called Forte Prenestino to share in the evolution of the comics/printed art underground. It’s a source of inspiration for AltCom and for a lot of what I do and how I do it.

Idyllic breakfast with background reminder…

Our cell:

The theme for this year was APERTO (OPEN), similar to the NO BORDERS theme of AltCom 2012, so that fit us well considering what we’re usually publishing.

One of our neighboring cells

On June 22 there was also a huge demonstration against evictions of squats as well as against raised rents in general. CRACK! has a natural connection to this since Forte Prenestino is a squat since 1986. I didn’t go to the demo myself because I can’t handle being out in the Italian heat for that long, but rumor says it was a manifestation of around 100 000 people.

I was asked to make a sticker or something for the demo, but I found this and couldn’t imagine doing it any better.

I also have to say, without going into details, that the crisis management from the festival organizers is very commendable. They managed to turn an incident into an assembly of around a hundred artists to discuss what had happened. In the end some people disrupted the meeting and I’m not sure where they will go from where it ended, but I fully trust them to handle it in an intelligent way that is respectful to many different aspects of the whole situation.

—

A while ago, we opened a new permanent exhibition at Hybriden, with works that have been produced at Fanzineverkstaden by its members and/or workshop participants. It was also, finally, the official release event for Fosfor, our zine distribution system.

The Lore exhibition is still up, with material related to the theme of the latest issue of CBA. The best bet if you still haven’t seen it is to go this week (Wed-Fri 11-15 + Sun 12-15). After that, Hybriden will close for the summer except for the opening of the Qtopia exhibition on July 19 (at Hybriden). As I write this, we’re actually in the final stages of finishing to files for CBA vol 45: Qtopia to send off to the printer.

—

We’ll be back in August at Fanzineverkstaden, open weekdays between 15-21, with lots of new workshops coming up during the fall, so keep an eye open for that. And do use the place, because it’s a great opportunity to print stuff and try some new ways for self-publishing, and you never know how long it’ll last (except we know we’ll be here for at least another year). We also brought home some examples from CRACK! to use for inspiration.

—

And speaking of things that are being printed as we speak… My contributions to the upcoming Wormgod book, After the ends of the world 2 by me and Susanne Johansson, have largely been produced at Fanzineverkstaden in between my regular working hours. More on that later, but here are a few of the pages from the book that I also showed as prints at CRACK!

New zine for Seriefest

There’s a book I’ve been planning to get around to but that may never happen, and I really needed to put out something new and the zinefest called Seriefest is coming up this weekend in Malmö. So I thought: why not take a break from all the paperwork and whatever else I do at work, take an excerpt from the book, rewrite it to work as a stand-alone story, and make a zine out of it?

And here it is, made at Fanzineverkstaden:

But wait, there’s more to it!

I actually made it as one of three submission for the upcoming CBA vol 44: LORE, but one of the others made it into the book and I felt I should do something with this since I went to the trouble of rewriting it and someone should get a chance to read it.

So yeah, now you got the full back story. Happy now?

Angered, Gothenburg

I will return now the my cave and the boring work stuff waiting for me there. See you at Seriefest this weekend!