Category: Work

2010: a summary

Thought I’d try to recollect what I’ve done this past year. Starting with December 2009, since that’s where we are now and also since that’s really when the year started for me…

SPYWARE

During two weeks last December I made the story Spyware, which will be part of the upcoming Piracy is Liberation book 009: Deicide and which went on to the final round (top 8!) of the Japanese Morning International Comics Competition.

DYSTOPIA

December was also the start of the Dystopia project, which is a title I’m doing for Wormgod & The Swedish Comics Association. Different artists doing sequential short stories on their visions of the dark future that may or may not be on its way. These are the books that have come out during the year:

01
Side A: Vanja & Vanja by Danijel Zezelj
Side B: Desert by Carol Swain
(also available in Swedish)

 

02
Freak Dreaming by Artùras Rožkovas

03
Side A: TK 47 by Spyros Verykios
Side B: Nail Story / Ramon by Igor Hofbauer
(also available in Swedish)

  

04
Reclaimed by me…
(also available in Swedish)

05
Munk by AKAb

 

06
Side A: War Peace by Rocco Lombardi
Side B: Blatte Royale by Amanda Casanellas

 

07
by Sarah Kläpp
Side A: White Light Bright Heat
Side B: The Shut Room

 

08
The Moon Boy by Jyrki Heikkinen

09
Side A: Ulac Smah Ulac by Rocco Lombardi
Side B: Me & my Daddy & Zlatan by me

 

10
Zombies by Wormgod (me and Susanne Johansson)

PIRACY IS LIBERATION

I also made one book in the Piracy is Liberation series this year. Book 008: Spiders pt 2 (cover by Susanne Johansson):

And I started serialising Piracy is Liberation as a webcomic, starting in May from page 1 och book 001, publishing one new page every day, but somewhere in the end of the summer I kind of stopped updating it. It will come back on track, I promise! Hopefully soon. Chack out

www.elftorp.com/piracy

WORLD TOUR 2010

Ok, let’s see. I wasn’t at Angoulême or MoCCA this year (nor Bok- och Biblioteksmässan or the Anarchist Book Fairs in Stockholm or London), but I did go to the Kemi festival in northern Finland, where I recieved third prize in their comics competition (for Jag & min Pappa & Zlatan). Then, there was the SPX in Stockholm, Komiks.dk in Copenhagen, my favorite festival, CRACK! in Rome and the always nice Helsinki comics festival. And, of course AltCom 2010 in Malmö, but more on that later.

WORMGOD

Second year of Wormgod started off with a DJ session by Suss at Skånes Konstförening in conjunction with a noise gig starring Con-Dom, Metal Pip! and Pestdemon.

Next, we made a guest appearance at a C’est Bon Kultur project: C’est Bon Black Box at Makeriet:

I June, I brought some prints and made a wall painting at the CRACK! festival in the catacombs beneath Forte Prenestino in Rome:

 

A rerun of the CRACK! prints with the addition of a new one were shown at the SingSang Studio in Malmö later in the summer, where we also arranged a gig with Concrete Threat.

At the Helsinki festival, we were invited to present an exhibition at the Helsinki Comics Centre, so we made a sequel to the konSEKVENS exhibition from 2009:

 

The latest thing we’ve done was the Wormgod: ZOMBIES exhibition, where we made a huge painting (1,8 x 25 m) being shown at Panora in Malmö during the AltCom 2010 festival.

An assortment of different Wormgod images will also be shown this December at the Feira Laica festival in Lisbon.

ARG KANIN

Made some new Angry Animals work. Some was published in magazines, some just on my blog. Especially around the time of the Swedish election.

Before:

And after:

I also made an Arg Kanin comic for Seriefrämjandet’s MUS, MOUSE, MAUS exhibition during AltCom and another for Asylgruppens kalender (which you can read if you buy it from them, it should be out soon).

MÖLLEVÅNGSAFESTIVALEN

Somewhere in the midst of all this I also managed to make all the graphic design work for Möllevångsfestivalen…

ALTCOM 2010

From August, most of what I’ve done has had something or other to do with the AltCom 2010 comics festival.

I made the graphics, designs, website and organisational work (with assistance from my subcomandante, Aida Ghardagian). My work was featured in several exhibitions connected to the festival, such as:

Wormgod: ZOMBIES (with Susanne Johansson)

MUS, MOUSE, MAUS (still on show at the City Library)

Tecknare mot Borgare: Sex & krig i det Nya Sverige, at the AltCom Asylum party at Kontrapunkt

and the AltCom 2010 SEX & WAR anthology:

Various participants, cover by Ho Che Anderson

Yeah, I think that’s it, but knowing myself I’m probably forgetting something.

Edit no 1: Oh, yeah, I was interviewed and will be featured in the upcoming issue of Bild & Bubbla with a comic I’m calling Interdimensional Revolution.

Edit no 2: I knew I forgot something else. As you can see in the older entries of this blog, I made illustrations for Lena Sundström‘s book Världens Lyckligaste Folk as it ran for 22 weeks in Helsingborgs Dagblad during the spring/summer.

Edit no 3: Uhm, yes. The anarchist magazine Brand just released a special issue 2.5 called Life in Limbo, where they used some photos from Wormgod: ZOMBIES to illustrate the undead state of liberalism…

I’m going to give this post a rest now and stop updating. Check the links in the text above and at the bottom of this page to see more…

Trivia: All this was done without the ability to make an appointment on time or go to bed before 4, and without making much money (I know people who make more in two months than I do in a year). And I still had time to get drunk (at least) a couple of times a week.

And so, 2011 is coming up and my plans include:

At least two more Piracy is Liberation books.
Finishing the graphic novel version of Jag & min Pappa & Zlatan.
More Dystopias.
More Wormgod stuff.
And, last but not least, Changing the face of the Swedish comics scene, maybe forever.

Morning International Comics Competition: results!

The results from Japanese Morning Magazine’s International Comics Competition are finally out. I knew I was among the 21 finalists, and then I made it into the top 8, which I’m very happy with. See the list of finalists and winning entries here (also note that I’m not the only artist from sweden. I was joined in the first round of 21 finalists by Maria Frölich).

≪Judge’s Comment≫While the story driven by the main character’s monologue is flat, the protagonist’s behaviors and the appearance of the “god” [she] sees are surprising, giving this work a strong impact. Unfortunately, this entry’s ending was difficult to understand, and ultimately it did not leave a good impression.

The fact that I didn’t make it into the top 3 means that I’m free to use this story as I please, which is fine by me and lets me put it into Piracy is Liberation book 009: Desert Stories. So now I’m more than 1/3 done with that book. The rest will be a remake of the story The Lord of Flies, that I made back in 2001 for C’est Bon #1. The book will concentrate on the apocalypse rather than the usual cyberpunk postapocalypse, so it will be quite different from the rest of the series. I’m looking forward to working on it, though I suspect it may take me a while before I have the time…

Yesterday, I finally started working on the script for the album-length version of Jag & min Pappa & Zlatan, which is supposed to be around 100 pages and all drawn and ready within a month. Some hard work ahead…

The other thing that will take up a lot of my time will be working with the AltCom 2010 festival. I’m vary happy to say that the list of international guests will include artists such as Ho Che Anderson and Ivan Brun. I should also mention that the festival anthology is still open for submissions (on the theme of SEX & WAR). See the site for details.

Wormgod: LOVEHATE!

July 30 in Malmö at the Sing Sang Studio:
Concrete Threat: HARSH NOISE DEATH release + live gig / Wormgod: LOVEHATE exhibition
Start time: 22:00.
Entrance fee: 40 SEK

Wormgod exhibition at the release of HARSH NOISE DEATH, the all-new 6-cassette box collection from Concrete Threat, legendary harsh noise band from Helsingborg (still talked-about since the gig at Stapelbädden in February 2009).

The HARSH NOISE DEATH box collects most of Conctrete Theat’s production since they started, almost 5 years ago:
Noise-In-A-Box
In Cold Blood
Death Trap
Blood Red / Stone Dead
Thrusts Of Passion
The Pine Grove Killings
Black Omen
+ tracks from splits with Vomir, Werewolf Jerusalem and Ichorous

Concrete Threat website

Wormgod website

—At this event—
Concrete Threat – LIVE GIG
CT delivers the harshest and most brutal in the harsh/wall noise genre, as usual. Prepare for head trauma.

Wormgod: LOVEHATE exhibition
Two images from Wormgod’s exhibition at the CRACK! festival website in Rome recently + one new collaboration, created specifically for this event.

Johan+Johan DJ-set
Techno/inudstrial all night when the band isn’t playing.

HD: Världens Lyckligaste Folk 17-18

Two new illustrations published since last one I showed on this blog in the Världens Lyckligaste Folk series (by Lena Sundström) in Helsingborgs Dagblad. The first one is about the debate about veils that has been going on in various European countries. Denmark being one of them:

Translation:

-Because you are so oppressed, we are now going to tell you what to wear.

-Seriously…

And the other one, about statistics on the media coverage of different subjects before elections, and how that may affect the outcome (for example, foreigners was the subject of around 60% in the debates before the last Danish election):

Piracy is Liberation 001: Information Wants to be Free (third edition)!

Yesterday, I sent the third edition of Piracy is Liberation 001: Information Wants to be Free to the printer.

Pirate is an information addict. When he recieves a cry for help: ‘Information wants to be free’, he has to find out what it means. Only problem is that the infopolice are hot on his trail, so he has to run and avoid falling in the same trap that Information did.

Unaltered story content but with a new cover made by me and Susanne Johansson. I also wrote this new introduction:

Three years have passed since the second edition of this book came out, and nothing much has changed. We’ve had a right-wing government in Sweden since then and immigrants and poor people are treated badly just as they were under the Social democrats before them. On an international scale, it’s also more or less the same old stuff. War, poverty and environmental disasters as a result of capitalism still going strong.

So this is the third edition, complete with a new cover by me and my Wormgod partner, Susanne Johansson, and the world is working its way towards making my dystopian vision come true. A postapocalypse where capitalism is religion and the inhabitants of the last enormous city are kept ignorant of the world outside and even the concept of history. Which is also a reflection of our current affairs, where we are being presented with an illusion telling us that we are at the height of human civilization (ie the globalised Western civilization). That we are going in a certain direction and no real deviation is possible.

This is not true, of course. We just need to think outside the City. Outside the boundaries on our thinking that have been laid on us through television, through the school system, through a society that needs us to be wage laborers first and human beings second.

We have the technology for new ways of distributing information now. And even though those in power try to limit the possibilities of this free exchange of thoughts and ideas, information wants to be free and information will be free. And when we’ve managed to see beyond the indoctrination, to think for ourselves, to find and create and spread our own information, we need to turn those thoughts into actions. Because information is dangerous only when it breeds new thoughts, thoughts when they breed action.

So after you read this book, if you like it, tell your friends to buy it. Or, if they can’t afford it, direct them to a free version of it on the internet. Or, if you can’t find one, scan the pages and spread it yourself. Piracy is, after all, liberation.

Mattias Elftorp
Malmö, Sweden, 2010

 Published by Wormgod.