Category: Piracy is Liberation

I’m starting to run out of copies of the first Piracy is Liberation book, so I decided to share the entire series as a webcomic.

The webcomic will be updated once a day. As an extra bonus, I’ll occasionally be
running a commentary track along with the images. I also might do some pages
now and then in color…

It all begins May 15 2010 at www.elftorp.com/piracy!

I’m not going to the MoCCA festival this year (this weekend, actually, in New York City. Go check it out if you’re there).

But I am going to be at SPX in Stockholm in a few weeks (April 23-25), and I’m also going to Komiks.dk (May 21-23). We’re also trying to find the money to go to the Crack! festival (June 17-20) in Rome to do a Wormgod exhibition…

I’ll be selling Piracy is Liberation and Dystopia at these events, and possibly some other goodies as well. And even if I’m not there, at least the Piracy is Liberation books are going to be available at MoCCA. Look for them at the Swedish table!

Just for fun, here’s the Piracy is Liberation story so far told in chapters:

TERROR 2.0
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE
PIRACY IS LIBERATION
ANNIVERSARY
INFOTRIP
COMMUNICATIONS
WIRES
SLAVE
CONSEQUENCES
COP(Y)
PREPARATIONS
STRIKE
RECLAIMED
FREE SECTION
CONSEQUENCES
OUTSIDE
VIOLENCE
INTERROGATION
CLEANING UP
INITIATION
DEAD CITY
AT THE ARCADE
SPIDER
FREE CITY
CHURCH
TRANSCENDENCE
SPIDERS

Now we’re talking. Cover art for Piracy is Liberation 008: Spiders pt 2 by Susanne Johansson:

Review of Piracy is Liberation at Sekventiellt.se…

It’s a very nice review by Fredrik Strömberg. Took him a while to get around to it, but when he did it, he did a thorough job with it. Some of my favorite passages:

The story behind the making of Mattias Elftorp’s magnum opus Piracy is Liberation is quite unlike anything in Sweden. Elftorp has worked on this project since the beginning of the 21st century, handling the production, publishing and marketing parts mostly by himself (first through C’est Bon now through Wormgod), never making much money out of it (and the little there is, is always put into the next printing) and, most importantly, never compromising with his artistic integrity. And this he has. Lots of it. I know, I have been involved in the making of several of these stories, reading them through, giving advice knowing that most of it will be ignored…

Oh, what the hell. I’ll just publish the whole thing here (high-lighting the important stuff)… Still worth the trip to his blog. Frequently updated and lots of interesting comics-related stuff.

Then there’s Elftorp’s penchant for mixing in several different influences into his genre crossing comics. He himself describes them on the project’s website as: “Political theory, filtered through autobiography, masked as fiction in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse…” Well, for the postapocalyptic part, The Matrix is a quite obvious influence, with a lot of cyberpunk thrown in for good measure. Then there’s the political part, where already the title indicates the anarchistic tendencies. And the autobiographical parts… Well, the main character is quite obviously based on the artist himself, at least visually. And that the political part of these stories are a real and genuine part of Elftorp can be seen by the fact that he himself has uploaded the first volumes of the series as torrents on The Pirate Bay.

Anyway, I have read most of these comics in various stages, but never all in one go, which I just did. An interesting experience.

The art is expressive, sometimes to the point of being unintelligible. Elftorp has an uncompromising attitude towards his art, where the initial feeling of a drawing is more important than making a certain character look exactly the same, panel after panel. When reading Piracy is Liberation I can never really decide whether this is good or bad, or both. After a while I get really into it though and as with other good auteur comics, the story and the art meshes together to a unity where one could not exist without the other.

The story line is a bit complicated, but never for the sake of being complicated. Sometimes it is very straightforward action, sometimes it messes with the mind of the reader and jumps backwards and forwards in time, playing with the whole cyberpunk theme of being able to upload your consciousness to the net. As a voracious comics reader I of course like the part in volume four, where Elftorp plays with the form of comics and mixes metahumor with cyberpunk and lets the characters actually travel across the comics pages, aware of being part of a comics and able to walk backwards and forwards in time – echoing the creation process of the comic in itself.

Very shortly put, the story in Piracy is Liberation takes place in a post-apocalyptic world which resembles ours in many ways, but where the whole world is made up of a city where the population is kept in a state of subdued subordination through indoctrination mainly via TV (and yes, V for Vendetta does spring to mind, as does Alan Moore’s own inspiration, 1984 by George Orwell, of course). Fighting against the corrupt corporate system is a small group of pirates using the internet to access iformation, attacking the authority, orgnanising rebellion. It’s all on one level a political metafor for the lives we live today, but never to the point of killing the story, which is engaging, sometimes fast paced and often very clever, with the main characters having to copy themselves into reality due to being locked up in a virtual prison, and the ramifications this entails when there are several version of them walking around. Here Elftorp actually does several things I haven’t read or seen before, which is inpressive as the whole post-apocalyptic/cyberpunk genre has been flogged to death many times over, as far as I’m concerned.

But it’s the genuine feeling of the political convictions pulsating thorugh Piracy is Liberation that keeps my interest going and that is what will make me keep reading in the future. Knowing that Elftorp has this series planned to at least 20 volumes I’d be surprised if there isn’t a film made somewhere along the way. I just hope the whole idea of Piracy is Liberation won’t be lost in a Hollywood production (which in itself is the negation of the message of the story). Anyway, until then, do read this strange combination of action and political philosophy and make up your own mind. That’s the main message Elftorp is trying to convey.

Ok, ok. Long time no blogging. I’ll try to make it up in the days to come.

So. What’s new?

Today, I’ve made the translation of Dystopia04: Reclaimed into Swedish. Everything except the title, which I will have to figure out during the evening. Something that retains the double meaning of the English one, if possible. But the best I’ve come up with so far is “Dagen då vi spöade snuten“. I’m not sure if that’s good enough.