Category: Tusen Serier

The Police

Reposting this as kind of a contribution to the current discussion about racism and police violence.

It’s a chapter from my graphic novel Me & my Daddy & Zlatan. I started working on this story back in 2009, trying to capture the feeling in some parts of Sweden (which is NOT a perfect country where Police are great and serviceminded to everyone and racism is a thing of the past if it ever even existed here, no matter what some people seem to think). Hope you enjoy it. I really wish it would have been outdated by now, but sadly it isn’t.

Click images to make them bigger/more readable:

zlatan-eng_a5-58 zlatan-eng_a5-59 zlatan-eng_a5-60 zlatan-eng_a5-61 zlatan-eng_a5-62 zlatan-eng_a5-63 zlatan-eng_a5-64 zlatan-eng_a5-65 zlatan-eng_a5-66You can order the book, ins Swedish or English version, from the Hybriden webshop.

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…

Exhibition + bookfair in Angered

On September 21, Tusen Serier will have a table at Angered’s bokmässa (with some stuff from CBK and Wormgod as well) in Gothenburg. I will do a presentation together with Amalia Alvarez who will also do one of her own.

And there will be an exhibition by me: Sagor från Angered, which showcases pages from a graohic novel I started working on with Amanda Casanellas in 2016. Hopefully, the book will actually be finished at some point, but that’s pretty far in the future, the way things look now.

So the best way to see at least parts of it will be this exhibition, and a zine version of one of its chapters, remastered to be a standalone story called Encounter in the woods, published by Tusen Serier in cooperation with Konstepidemin, Konsthallen Blå Stället and Kultur i Väst. The zine will be given away for free at Blå Stället, and we’ll also have some copies at Hybriden.

Koshk visit & En Andra Chans release

If you’re in Malmö this Wednesday (Oct 18), you should drop by Konsthallen between 19-21 for a workshop with Tusen Serier, Koshk (from Egypt) and Historielabbet. It’s an opportunity to meet Egyptian (and also local) comics people to talk and draw together.

And on Friday (October 20) it’s not only my birthday but also the release exhibition for mine and Shko Askari‘s (who also has his birthday that day) book En Andra Chans (order here if you can’t make it on Friday).

As you may know, this book is kind of special. Since it’s in both Swedish and Arabic, the storytelling structure had to accomodate the direction you read both languagues. It’s two intertwined stories that meet in the middle to form a coherent whole. It was quite interesting to figure out and I think it worked really well in the end.

The exhibition/release party is at Hybriden (@ Mitt Möllan, Bangatan 5, Malmö), between 17-22 on October 20.

It will feature Shko’s images from the book and a couple of extra drawings by me. For most of the characters, this will be the first time I ever draw them, so I’m kind of excited myself to see how they turn out 😛

Anyway, see you there!

Some sequels…

Had a meeting with Raquel Lozano last week about Bekele 2. It’s just the first step where we made a list of themes and maybe a few scenes that we wanted to include in the book. General directions we wanted to move Bekele and the other characters in.

Came home a bit drunk from that, so I guess it wasn’t the same day bu the day after, where I wrote down another piece of voice-over for Transgressions 2. I had a session with that in early June as well, compiling ideas and writing some unfinished scenes and partial dialogue. I think I have a fair grasp of where I want to go with it. Some thoughts about ancient goddesses and fictionalisation of (what used to be) consensus reality. Piecing all of it together still remains, and also deciding how connected the story needs to be to the soundtrack, but I’m tentatively excited about it. The plan is to get it published next spring, so there’s still plenty of time.

And last night I had an idea and thought that maybe we should also make a sequel to After the ends of the world, but we’ll see about that. Especially since this is the only idea I have for it:

It started when the president of the United States, in his first term, decided to exit the Paris Agreement. Sure, there was one Democratic president just after him, but he ended up nuking a few countries, and after that it was all Republicans, so in the end the world declared war on the US, in an act of environmental self defense against their global suicide. So then we all got nuked in the end and now we have to live underground.

Linoprint!

It hasn’t always been easy for me to work with linoprint. But yesterday at a Tusen Serier workshop I discovered the softcut lino plate, which allowed me to work faster and more intuitively. So suddenly I felt more at home with the material.

These are not the best quality prints I made, but I like it when things aren’t perfect.

Coming soon in a collective zine from Amanda Casanellas and Tusen Serier…

Below the surface we are all dead. You just have to admit it, accept it and embrace it.
Everything isn’t black or white, they said. But that was a lie, of course, just like everything else.

 

This one is the one I’m most happy with. It’s not a print but the paper I had to protect the table from when I was rolling the lino:

To me, a big part of my aesthetics in art is about embracing accidents.

CRACK! and other recent stuff…

So I came back from CRACK! a couple days ago and tomorrow is the first day with no meeting or things I have to do, so I will set the phone to silent and stay away from any other means of contact with the outside world.

Maybe spend the day in New Bordeaux or in space or the future.

But before I go into my 24h hibernation, here are some things from recent times that you may find interesting:

New books:

En Andra Chans (Tusen Serier) was written by me and drawn by Shko Askari. It’s written in Swedish & Arabic and consists of two interconnected stories, read in different directions, that meet in the middle. About war, racism, integrity and migration.
You can order it here.

CBA vol 36|37 (CBK) was edited by me, with stories by Akab, Spyros Verykios, Elena Guidolin and Serena Schinaia, with a cover by Radovan Popovic. I’m very happy with this latest volume of the international art comics anthology. This one is all in English.
You can order it here. Here’s another pic of the cover, this one modified during CRACK!:

Speaking of CRACK!… One of the things that happened there was a gig with Noise Against Fascism, for which I made this backdrop (which turned into a kind of cape during the gig):

And while I’m writing this I’m answering Facebook comments on this text. Some people seem to be unable to think outside the boundaries of the law, even if the law is immoral, which is kind of worrying. Others seem to have problems with texts longer than a tweet, so here’s a short summary:

When I grew up, in the 1980s/90s in a small town in Sweden, anything out of the “normal” was weird and something to stay away from (reading comics/listening to techno/being gay/being born somewhere else/watching foreign movies/being female etc).
Parallel to this, it was hard for immigrants to get asylum here (and it’s worse now, no matter what right-wing propaganda you hear). And anarchism was unheard of as a viable ideology. The mainstream ruled.
It’s all connected so what we do in CBK/CBA is antiracist by providing a printed space for what isn’t seen as normal.

Of course, it’s more elaborate in the blog post, so maybe read that…

Here’s an excerpt, which I think may be the most controversial part:

Once, a bunch of years ago, I was with a large group of people outside the refugee detention centre in Malmö. We were there to stop a deportation of a man from… I don’t even remember from where. The police came to get him. We stood in the way, blocking all entrances. After a while, the cops said: “All right, now you’ve made your statement. You’ve expressed your opinion. Now stand aside and let us do our job”. That hit me on a deep level. We were there to save someone’s life, and they thought we just wanted to express out opinion and then things could go back to repressive normality. Of course we didn’t move. We stayed there all day, hungry, getting burned by the sun, until the guy managed to break a window from the outside and get out. Within minutes he was in a car being driven away from there, to a life in hiding. Maybe eight months later, he got his permit of residency, proving us right.

People here seem to think that opinions is something everyone can have, as long as they don’t interfere with reality. Conversely, they also see them as something harmless, which is why we’re supposed to be so lenient towards racism. Because it’s just an opinion, which anyone is entitled to, and it has nothing to do with real life (and, incidentally, they won’t hurt you as long as you belong to the white mainstream (but who worth considering isn’t white mainstream?)). Except it does. Anything that today is ‘just an opinion’, may tomorrow be the new mainstream, with real-life consequences.

In other news… A while ago I made this book cover for Malvarma Bufedo (SLEA) the Esperanto version of Jenny Wrangborg‘s Kallskänken. Got my copies of the book the other day (and you can (soon anyway) order it here):

Also, if you drop by Hybriden these days (it’ll probably be closed but if you’re lucky or look through the window), you can see the Berättelser från Yunnan (Tusen Serier) exhibition by Emei Burell. Or you can order the book here.

And you will also see our banner in support of the XM24 squat in Bologna:

I’ll finish this off with two pages from Transgressions (Wormgod) that I think illustrate part of the point I wanted to make in that CBK blog post (click for bigger version):

You can, of course, order it here…