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.

Livets Låga Slocknar, finally!

Yesterday, I got a package I’d ordered through Discogs. It’s a vinyl 7″ EP I made a cover illustration for, a little over 20 years ago, that I’d never seen irl before.

Actually, I didn’t make the image for them, but I offered that they could use something I’d already made. I suggested this for the cover:

but in the end they used this (not made by me):

They did, however, use one of mine for the inside cover. This one, which I originally made for the 2002 CBK exhibition »ACETON (CH3COCH3)«:

I’m pretty sure they sent me a copy back when, but I never managed to get it, for some confused reason. So this, 20+ years later, is the first time I actually see it and finally have it among my other records.

EDIT: Actually, it seems I made some more suggestions for the cover, which I just found while looking through some old files. So here are three cover suggestions, of which I already showed one, and I think two had potential, but none of them were used:

New stuff at Magasinet Konkret

My newspeak dictionary, which I first made for CBA vol 58 (also included in the (Anti)rasism exhibition last year) and have since translated and expanded a bit, is now up at Magasinet Konkret.

It’s an attempt to figure out the new meanings of words after some years of degradation and erosion where some words now seem to mean the opposite of what they used to and some simply don’t really mean anything anymore. At least if you are to trust how the words are used in the news and on social media…

Magasinet Konkret is publishing one word/day on their start page, with a link to the complete list. I like that this gets some attention, since CBA often goes under the radar for a lot of people.

Contradictory views

Another illustration I made for Magasinet Konkret a while ago.

The text is about how the far right in the US has two images of Sweden that serve to present us as both a role model and an example of how bad things can get. None of which are true. We’re neither the heroes who successfully ignored COVID nor overrun by queers and foreign criminals. We’re not even a Socialist paradise. Which any thinking person could figure out, but truth went out the window a long time ago in this stupid propaganda war…

We’re just as Capitalist as any other country, complete with racist migration policies and everything, even if we don’t currently shoot queers in the streets and we still have some sensible things like public health care etc, but who knows how long that’ll last…

Anyway, here’s the article, by Lisa Bjurvald (it’s in Swedish and you need to subscribe, but if you know the language, this is a subscription you should get anyway).

Comic in Portal #5

I have a comic in the new issue of Portal, an anthology comic book from The Swedish Comics Association.

There’s a release event for it tomorrow (June 30), with an exhibition of risoprinted pages from the issue, at Rum för Serier (Friisgatan 12, Malmö) between 17-20.

My comic, I förhörsrummet, is an excerpt from Piracy is Liberation 012, but rewritten into a self-contained new story, colored and translated to Swedish (a B/W version in English was published in CBA vol 58 last year). I liked how the colors turned out.

Here are some of the panels from the comic:

See you at the release!

Magasinet Konkret

There’s a new web-based Swedish news/culture mag: Magasinet Konkret

Remember when alternative media used to mean news and articles written from more of a leftist perspective compared to the mainly liberal mainstream news channels? When “liberal” meant center-leaning right-wing (which it still is even though the rest of the right are now trying to paint liberal as some kind of extreme left, inspired by the political climate in the US which is a two-party/one-ideology system)? Before alternative media as a concept was taken over and almost dominated by the far right (nationalist/conservative/racist etc) who are doing their best to paint the mainstream as dominated by extreme leftism, even though it’s still dominated by the same liberalism as before?

Anyway. Magasinet Konkret is trying to compensate by being a space for a bit more of those leftist perspectives that are so rare these days.

And I’m part of it! Just one illustration/text so far, but there will be more. Follow this link to see my contributions!

Here’s the illustration:

CBA vol 60 is here!

CBA vol 60: Stories just came from the printer!

This volume of CBA has no theme, it’s just stories:

Stories are a way to escape reality, but also a way to communicate and to help us understand the world around us. These are stories on different subjects, told with different voices in different ways by 13 creators from 7 countries.

Comics by: Leviathan [SE], Oasis of Hate [PL], Daniela Filippin [IT], Eugenio Belgrado [IT], Hroge Cancelhaus [UK], Ivana Geček [HR], Joseph Hughes [US] & João Fraga Netto [US], Oskar Aspman [SE], Tom Mortimer [UK], Korin(a) Hunjak [HR], Marcel Ruijters [NL].
Cover, text, illustrations & main editor: Mattias Elftorp [SE].

96 pages of international comics!

Get it from the Hybriden webshop!
This is also a good time to start a subscription.

Being main editor of this issue, I made a selection of lots of good stuff, both comics that were submitted for this issue and things that couldn’t fit into earlier volumes but was too good to not publish.

I’ve also written a text piece about various stories and myths that shape our lives, from religion to politics.

The cover was an experiment from a workshop (part of the workshops leading to the Paper Echoes exhibition) where we were supposed to put drawings into a pre-prepared non-linear panel grid. As a basis for the coloring I used a failed gelli-print from another of those workshops. It felt like a fitting image to use as a cover for this issue, with its storytelling theme.

Here’s one of the illustrations I made for my text piece:

Arg Kanin in Brand #1/2023

Arg Kanin om Kulturkanon (Angry Animal about the Cultural Canon), the same comic I had (still have for a couple more weeks) in the (Anti)rasism exhibition, is also published in the new issue of the anarchist magazine Brand!

This issue was printed in 3 separate colors, so I hade to modify it a bit. It felt similar to preparing files for risoprinting and I wasn’t exactly sure how it would turn out, but in the end it looked just as I had hoped.

You can buy it here.

The comic itself was heavily inspired by Sven Lindqvist‘s books Exterminate all the brutes and The Skull Measurer’s Mistake: And Other Portraits of Men and Women Who Spoke Out Against Racism, which I’ve written a bit about before. And also the recent debate in Sweden about the conservative nationalists wanting to impose an official cultural canon. Which is an idea not to be taken seriously as anything other than a way to make everything a bit more racist, nationalist and right-leaning.

Unused illustration

This is from a book project I was potentially going to be involved with. That never happened in the end because they went with an artist who could give them a better price (that happens sometimes, no big deal), so since I don’t like wasting my efforts, I thought I’d show it here instead.

I was aiming for a more androgynous look, but since I made this mainly as a sample, I never corrected it. In any case I was pretty happy with how it turned out. So here you go:

RELEASE EVENT: Piracy is Liberation 012 & Vårdfällan

It’s finally out!

On February 25 at 18-21 (or whenever we’re finished), at Poeten på hörnet (Södra Förstadsgatan 65B, Malmö), CBK, Wormgod and Tusen Serier invite you to a one day release event for Piracy is Liberation 012: Outer Enemy & Vårdfällan! A double book release with exhibition and book talks!

You can read about both books here.

There will be a small exhibition of prints from Piracy is Liberation. There will be wine. The books will be presented, with a reading from Vårdfällan. The books will be there, the authors will be signing, it’ll be great!
Welcome!

Both books are available for order now, from Hybriden and other places (Adlibris, Bokus, etc).

ORDER Piracy is Liberation 012: Outer Enemy
ORDER Vårdfällan

Piracy 012 is something I’ve been working on for the last year or so. It ended up as a 212 page examination of a City gearing up for war. It’s the 12th book of the series but don’t worry if you haven’t read the first 11. There’s a story so far section, and the entire series is also available from Hybriden.

Vårdfällan was written by Raquel Lozano, with cover and editing by me. Set in Malmö, it’s a scathing depiction of life as a worker in the health care business.

Here are a couple of sample pages from Piracy, which may or may not be part of the exhibition:





It’s getting harder and harder to be visible in social media, so feel free to help us by inviting anyone you know who might be interested! Thanks!