Category: ParaVox

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.

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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

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.

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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: