Piracy013 release tour 2024

My new book just came from the printer the other day, and I’ve just confirmed that there will be a release exhibition! So the 2024 release tour will be as follows:

Jönköping, April 26: The Old World Is Dying
Stockholm, May 25-26: SIS
Malmö, June 7: Release exhibition @ Rum för Serier

The Old World Is Dying (Insikten, Kulturhuset, Jönköping)
This is a noise event where I will have a Wormgod table along side Dice Dominion, Vertigo förlag.
Performing acts:
IDIOT CHILD (MALMÖ)
Violent sludgy noise rock from the dirty south.
TRAUMA COMMAND (MALMÖ)
Radical Feminist Power Electronics with a straight razor from Crime City.
FACTORY FARMING (GÖTEBORG)
Red Power electronics from the foggy Volvograd.
Both TRAUMA COMMAND and FACTORY FARMING are familiar faces from earlier events (and soundtracks) from Wormgod, and TRAUMA COMMAND is of course the other half of Wormgod and the cover artist for most of the Piracy books, including the new one.
If there’s space, I may bring a couple of books from CBK and Tusen Serier as well…
Check the facebook event for times, address and more updated info.

SIS 2024 (Kulturhuset, Stockholm)
The new edition of Stockholms Internationella Seriefestival. We will be there as usual with Wormgod, CBK and Tusen Serier, this time in the company of Dice Dominion. There’s not stage appearance by me planned this time, as I did that last year, but we’ll be there with a whole lot of books, prints and dice. See you there!
Facebook event

Release exhibition (Rum för Serier, Malmö)
And finally, there will be an official release party with en exhibition in Malmö.

A mix of classic cyberpunk elements in a dystopian future with a glimmer of postapocalyptic hope and a pinch of metamagic.

I haven’t made all the plans for this yet, but I will have all three rooms so I’ll probably also put up some of my older stuff as well as pages from the new book.
Maybe I’ll talk about the book, maybe I’ll discuss it with someone? Maybe there will just be a pile of books, some prints on the wall and a bunch of wine? Who knows?
In any case, I’m sure it’ll be great!
Event and stuff will come later.


I may also be going to the CRACK! festival again this year, since I haven’t been there for a few years and I miss it, but it’s not yet decided so we’ll see if the tour will be extended to include a trip to Rome and Forte Prenestino

I recently made an Arg Kanin comic about/against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza for an exhibition by Seriefraämjandet, also at Rum för Serier. I’m trying to get it published somewhere as well, but nothing confirmed yet. I’m not even sure exactly when the exhibition will be shown, just that it’ll happen soon, but I’ll post some info on that when I know more.

And I was invited to have some art in the exhibition at Balkanska Smotra Mladih Strip Autora (The Balkans Festival of Young Comics Creators) (June 28-30), so that’s another place where I’ll be showing some Piracy works.

Some CBA short stories…

Sometimes I submit comics for CBA (the international comics anthology from CBK) or other anthologies that are actually chapters from Piracy is Liberation. Usually, I rewrite or otherwise modify them a bit to make sure they can stand on their own, without the context they were originally made for. Right now, I have two such stories, in the latest and in the upcoming issues of CBA.

CBA vol 61: SPYWARE
This one is pretty old. I made it originally for the Morning International comics competition in Japan in 2010, where it actually came in among the top 8. Which is super cool and better than I had expected. It also somehow validates my manga-esque storytelling even though my visuals don’t really fit into what is regularly seen as the manga style…

Since it was set in the world of Piracy is Liberation, I included it in book 009 and actually built the rest of that book around this story, at least in part.

Then, when Caroline Ulvros (main editor of CBA vol 61) chose the theme FINGERS AND TEETH, I realized that this story would fit. There’s a scene in the story where the main character takes a rock and bashes out her own teeth, which was in turn inspired by a scene in 12 Monkeys, where Bruce Willis’ character locks himself in a bathroom with a hammer to take care of surveillance equipment he believes have been planted in his teeth. As I recall, he looks happy and satisfied more than anything else when he comes out with the bloody smile of a successful operation.

CBA vol 62|63: UNTIL DEATH
Oskar Aspman
‘s theme for this issue was LIMINAL SPACE. I had just written a chapter for the new Piracy book where I tried to get into the mind of an AI smart-missile and follow it on its short lifespan from being fired to its final detonation. Which made perfect sense for a cyberpunk concept, but I also tried to model it after phases in a human life, from birth/youth to self-discovery, through a philosophical phase, interpersonal interactions and so on, until death.

For the version in the Piracy book, I had to make some tiny adjustments in the text as well as adding a few pages to integrate it into the story in rest of the book. I also changed the title to DEATHDRIVE SENTIENCE.

Ignoring any parallels to real life (Sweden joining NATO, Israel bombing Gaza again), there were some external inspirations behind this story as well. In Karin Boye‘s Kallocain, a Swedish sci fi novel from 1940 (same era and dystopian subgenre as George Orwell‘s 1984 and Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World), the main character lives in one of a few megastates that seem to have divided the world amongst each other and who wage endless war against each other. It’s actually much the same setting as in 1984 and in Katsuhiro Otomo‘s short story CANNON FODDER (not included in the manga collection Memories as I first misremembered, but it’s in the anime of the same name).

That image stuck with me since reading these stories some 20-30 years ago, of a nation waging a never-ending war, routinely and perpetually firing rockets from cannons operated by peoplo who don’t really know who the enemy is, they just know that they’re at war and have a job to do. And since the current storyline, started in Piracy book 012, is about the City going to war against an unknown enemy, it was something I couldn’t help but include. Both as a reference to those great works of dystopian sci fi from the mid-1900s and to the feeling of living in a world where there’s always some war going on, performed by people who have no say in how the war is waged, or why, or when it might end.

CBA vol 61 came a couple of month ago and CBA vol 62|63 will arrive a few weeks from now, together with Piracy 013. They can all be found at Hybriden.se

Coming very soon: Piracy is Liberation 013 + CBA vol 62|63

Last week, I finally managed to send my new book, Piracy is Liberation 013: Missile Crisis to print, and it’ll arrive around April 20.

You can order it now, from Hybriden and it’ll be shipped as soon as we have it from the printer!

The City is firing sentient smart-missiles against terrorists hiding in the previously unknown desert. But who is this outer enemy?
Using metamagic, Purple learns how to fly and takes Information and Erica on an expedition to find out, but the truth comes with unexpected dangers.

At 236 pages, this is my thickest book yet (not counting the massive collections) and, if I dare say so myself, the best one so far!

I will also have it for sale at a noise event in Jönköping, April 26: The Old World Is Dying. As you can see, not only will the music be great but it will also be the first official appearance by Dice Dominion! And if you didn’t know, TRAUMA COMMAND is Susanne Johansson who made most of the Piracy covers, including the new one. FACTORY FARMING also contributed to the soundtrack for After the Ends of the World 2 (and a bunch of Wormgod events, sometimes under different names). This is not to be missed!

Coming from print at the same time is also the new CBA vol 62|63: Liminal Space, where I also have a comic. It’s actually the first chapter from Piracy 013, but a slightly different version. It’s rewritten to work as a stand-alone story, but I’ve also handled post-production of the images differently…

You can pre-order CBA vol 62|63 from Hybriden.

Cover by Oskar Aspman, who was also the main editor of this issue

Seriefest 2023

This weekend (Sep 2-3) it’s Seriefest in Malmö (in Ridhuset, Folkts Park).

We’ll be there with a selection of books, along with Tusen Serier/Wormgod/Hybriden (the policy is to only sell things made by creators who is present. Luckily, Mattias Elftorp will be there and he’s been involved in lots of books)…

There will also be 2 Hybriden-related items in the program:

Tusen Serier: Jorge Varas Varilla
(Saturday 1630-1650)
Jorge Varas Varilla from Tusen Serier talks about his career as a satire illustrator and how graphic humor was used as a tool for wishing for social change in the 1960s Chile. He tells about Allende’s government, about the military coup and also about his own arrest and exile.
www.varilla.se

CBK/Wormgod: Mattias Elftorp
(Sunday 1300-1320)
Talk with Mattias Elftorp about the international comics anthology CBA and about the cyberpunk postapocalypse of his Piracy is Liberation. War mania in a future where Capitalism is the only religion.
www.elftorp.com

See you there!

Coming soon(ish)

I’m now 53 pages into the story, so still a bit left but it feels good!


EDIT (a week or so later): I’m now thinking of maybe moving some chapters around, which would basically dividing this book into two. But we’ll see.

This is the exciting part of writing things more or less on the fly, especially when each book is part of a larger story. You’re never completely sure what’s going to happen. I mean it’ll all fit together and make sense in the end, but what script I do have isn’t so strict that there’s no room for changes depending on what will, in the end, be the best reading experience (I guess you’ll be the final judge on that when you read it). Anyway, nothing set in stone yet. I had some interesting ideas yesterday, so I’ll try to fot them into the over all plotline. I’m sure it’ll be fine 🙂

Piracy 005-008 digital comics!

I recently put up another batch of digital Piracy is Liberation books for download at Hybriden.

Sometime within a year I plan to also make book 009-011 available like this, and a year after that books 012-013. In other updates, I’ve finished the first few pages of Piracy is Liberation 013: War and Pieces, which will hopefully be out by the end of this year, possibly beginning of 2024. But more on that later…

What happens when the rules have suddenly changed and the police can do nothing but watch as people party in the streets? What happens when even the rules of reality can be broken? One section of the City where Capitalism is the only religion has been freed from the influence of landlords and indoctrinating television, but when the authorities come back with a vengeance to evict the Free Section, expect violence.
Meanwhile, something is moving on the net. Some kind of entities seem to be interfering with its users. What are these Spiders and how will they affect the plans for the Information Upgrade that the anarchists are planning?
Also in this collection:
Can Technograph change the past through timetravel?
And introducing Ming, the open source web-based sentient being.
Political theory, filtered through autobiography masked as fiction, in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse.
320 pgs
Name your price (minimum 72 sek)

This is a collection of four more books of the Piracy is Liberation series, in digital versions based on the original publications. They are downloadable as a CBR file, a classic format for filesharing comics. You can open it in various comics reader apps, or just a regular unZIP or unRAR app.
Digital comics should be much cheaper than paper books, so it’s a “name your price” deal, with a minimum price based on page count.


Digital download bundle of books 001-004 is of course also still available:

Cyberpunk stories in a future where Capitalism is the only religion, where only sinners disobey and nobody loves a sinner. Pirate is one of those sinners, downloading illegal information straight into his mind to get high. When he gets caught while trying to free Information, he has to use all his skills as a 4-dimensional hacker to break them out of digital prison.
One year later, he’s part of a group trying to free sections of the City from the clutches of brainwashing television, riot cops and the Priests and Masters who control everything.
Meanwhile, Erica toils away as a Slave in the factory. But what’s the dark secret behind the cogs and wheels and levers of her machine? What hides in the desert that no one knows exists? And what of the Drivers and their upcoming strike?
Political theory, filtered through autobiography masked as fiction, in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse.
266 pgs
Name your price (minimum 60 sek)

 

 

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!

 

Coming soon: Piracy is Liberation 012!

It’s been 10 years in the making, but now it’s finally (soon) here:

Piracy is Liberation book 012: Outer Enemy

Terror strikes the City, and Pirate seems to be the terrorist! Or is this finally the start of the revolution?
As the City is gearing up for war, two girls walk its streets looking for action and trying to figure out what actually happened.
How will our anarchist heroes deal with this situation as the equivalent to nationalist tendencies grip the population?
What happens in a City where war has been an unknown concept, as its billboards are filling up with WANTED posters and military propaganda and the army recruitment centers are opening up for business?
Who is the enemy?


This is also the return to CBK, who published the first 6 books in the series. From book 012, Piracy is Liberation will be published as a cooperation between CBK and Wormgod.

And don’t worry if you haven’t read the first books. Book 012 is a good place to jump into it, with a story so far section that tells you in short what you need to know. And if you want to get into the back story to get the full experience, we have all the back issues and collections at Hybriden for a good price!


The official release will be early in 2023, but we’ll figure out some excuse to offer a sneaky pre-release sale of it already in December of 2022. Both so that all your friends and family won’t have to miss getting it for christmas and because I’m just too excited to have piles of books lying everywhere with no one else being able to get them. We’ve all waited a long time for this, haven’t we? Book 011 came all the way back in 2012.

I’ll write more about this later, just wanted to let you see the cover (by Susanne Johansson) and start preparing for its arrival…

Did you know…

FORBIDDEN TRUTHS
An After the ends of the world excavation

[This text was published in the recent CBA vol 53: PLaceholder (order here)]

The following message was found in the ruins of the Earth civilization that ended with the Sixth Mass Extinction. Converted from what was called “the internet”, an archaic means of communication that was widespread at the time, this archaeological find is included in the collection “Earth; how did it all end? Clues and ruminations”:

Did you know that COVID-19 isn’t actually contagious the way we’ve been lead to believe? The virus is in fact spread through vaccinations. Which means this is a plan that’s been prepared and slowly implemented during much of the 20th century. It’s easy to figure out because that’s the period during which most of the now afflicted got their vaccinations as children. Whoever did this against humanity have enormous resources, based on the fact that they’ve managed to do this globally and over such an amount of time, not to speak of the meticulous planning necessary to activate it just now, in 2019/2020 when 5G technology created the right amount of background radiation for the latent virus to be activated.

So who has resources on that level? There is at least one organisation who, for centuries and on a global scale, has managed to trick most of humanity into believing that the Earth is a globe, in spite of the overwhelming evidence proving it’s actually flat. The name of that organisation is NASA. It is quite possible, even probable, that they are agents of the reptile race living in the hollow places beneath the surface of the flat Earth. Reptiles who disguise themselves as the political, financial and cultural elites of the world, controlling our lives for generation after generation, possibly for millennia. They get their powers from the blood of human children, sexually violated in Satanic rituals. Power they use to control our destiny and, sometimes, to turn frogs gay for some reason.

If you’ve ever felt that your life didn’t turn out the way you had envisioned, that’s them. If you’re wondering why there is war, poverty and starvation, that’s them. Some people would say that the fault lies in systems of economy, such as Capitalism, but it’s more realistic to assume those theories are planted by the reptiles themselves as a way of diverting our attention from the real truth. We know that Capitalism is the best way for humans to fulfill their potential, through competition and with profit as the driving force. It is after all what human nature dictates, and not at all like the hunger for power that drives the lizards and fuels their conspiracies to keep us down.

The probable origin of these reptiles is Nibiru, the tenth planet, which will soon return to what is commonly called the solar system, passing close to the Earth as it has done before on its long, elliptical orbit around the sun.

The “Sun”, however, is actually a lamp moving according to pre-set patterns across the sky, a few hundred meters (or possibly kilometers) above ground. That’s why they don’t want you to stare directly into it, because they’re afraid you might see it for what it really is.

That the pandemic broke out when it did might very well be because so many people started to find out about the truth, in spite of corrupt institutions like the education system or the old-school news media. We lost those struggles a long time ago, but the internet has given us a new weapon. The US military, who developed the internet, is an institution that has somehow managed to resist for a long time, but it has now also been infiltrated, another victim of the Gay Agenda. However, through various YouTube channels, chatrooms and other social media, we’ve been able to wake up a lot of people to what’s going on behind our backs.

Leading the brave resistance from his golden throne is Donald Trump, a man of the people who got rich by being chosen by God as the defender of freedom, decency and humanity itself, his riches trickling down to save the rest of us. He’s leading a movement of underdogs against hordes of traitorous politicians, fake news media and the Cultural Marxist elites, supported by antifascists who are themselves more or less nazis. After all, Hitler was a socialist or it wouldn’t be in the name of his ideology. Already in the 1980s, the fake news channels could sense Trump’s coming ascension, the great threat to the status quo, the manliest of men and most intelligent of smartbrains. Since back then, they’ve run an ongoing smear campaign, portraying him as a supervillain in the news as well as in movies produced by a Hollywood run by communists, liberals and other factions of the left, not to mention the satanists. He even had to develop his own brand of glossolalia to get past their censors, a language that is clearly understood by those who are sufficiently developed but sounds like gibberish to anyone else. That’s how he could move below the radar and grab the presidential power by the pussy with his great big hands.

As soon as the election scandal in the US has been solved and he is returned to the seat of power [something that may already have happened as you read this], he will surely save us from both the “pandemic” and the reptiles, queers, blacks and socialists. Then we will finally be free from our shackles of forced ignorance and cancel culture.

Not to mention the Jews who not only run the world by owning banks and corporations but also by instigating the invasion of the West by muslims who are slowly replacing white Europeans who should rightfully rule the world through their superior genes that are now being bred out of existence. Within possibly as little as 20 years, muslims will have completely replaced the whites, ruling through sharia, taking out ham from school lunches and possibly meat in general, leaving only halal-slaughtered vegan food and vegetable-based beer to further weaken the male population. Soy products have already killed the testosterone in so many men that soon, maybe as soon as 2030, half the planetary population will be gender-neutral trans people.

Transsexuals, a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in nature (just look at the seals, have you ever seen a male seal dressed in female clothes? Didn’t think so), are men who go through “corrective” surgery in order to infiltrate girls’ locker rooms. Our only hope in that arena may be that their perversions are at odds with the feminists who want to murder all men. With any luck they will kill each other, but more realistic prognoses say that they will band together along with the pedophile Satanists to crush normal society.

The problem is that women can’t use swords. In stark contrast to the indoctrination spread through various TV series, it is physically impossible for females to use that kind of weaponry. A sword might weigh as much as a few kilos, so it takes a man’s superior musculature and mental strength to lift and do any damage with it. This is why feminists developed other, more devious methods. They’ve completely taken over previously apolitical franchises like Star Wars and Marvel and replaced all the main characters with female, over-powered versions. These stories which used to be neutral tales of relatable heroism have now been turned into completely unrealistic depictions of dystopian worlds where women rule everything. Which is of course also what they are trying to do in real life.

But there is hope. There are clues throughout popular culture to open our eyes and expose the true enemy, the reptiles of the Illuminati. You may see hand signals or zoomed-in eyes in music videos, or phrases in movies that get a new meaning when taken out of context. These are either signs from cultural resistance fighters or subliminal messages from the Illuminati themselves, so watch out! Some of these artists are part of the agenda, so if you’re not sure that someone is already on the right side of history, you better stay away or you risk becoming another victim of their brainwash.

There are also resistance cells under the indirect leadership of brave men like Zack Snyder and others who are inexhaustibly exposing cases of infiltration by the agenda. It’s a constant struggle, like when they replaced Snyder with Joss Whedon in order to destroy the Justice League movie. However, that was a fight they didn’t win, as armies of online freedom fighters not only managed to get The Snyder Cut released but are also spreading awareness of multiple cases where women and people of color have taken over. They’ve bravely alerted us when previously great superhero comics turned bad because of shoehorned agendas, or when video games have abandoned the true fans who made game culture great. White boys are now completely left without any cultural safe spaces and are probably the most forgotten group in media culture as well as society in general.

This is how white men was turned into the endangered species they are today, with hardly any power or influence left in society. Now, after the Police have suddenly, out of the blue, been criticized and can no longer do their job properly because their hands are tied by red tape, we stand almost completely without protection. It’s what countless action movies have warned us about, but they were made by white men so no one listened, of course. Almost 90% of non-whites commit more or less all crime, so what are we to do when the Police are no longer allowed to execute the enemy on the streets, even if they catch someone driving a car or refusing to obey every single order? Unjustified or not, orders are orders and should be obeyed or law enforcement risks losing all legitimacy.

By the way, did you know that there were also white slaves and black people were responsible for almost all slavery in history, until Trump abolished it by separating invading Mexican families and also terrorism? So there is no reason at all to complain about racism because it doesn’t exist anymore and who are the real racists anyway? Except reverse racism against white people, which is real, but we’re not allowed to talk about that.

There are many more examples, but now you can hopefully see clearly how it’s all connected and how we must all do our best to make sure that incels can finally sleep with all the girls they want, for equality. As George Orwell said in the alt-right bible, 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a pink boot stamping on the white man’s face—forever”. Be like Neo in The Matrix: take the red pill so you can see the truth: men are men and women are immigrants and it’s all cultural Marxism.

Although the exact circumstances surrounding the fall of human civilization on Earth remain unclear, this is one of the few remaining documents from the era. Scholars believe it to be a good representation of the everyday concerns of the time and may contain crucial clues as to why the collapse happened. Note that these clues may be found more in the existence of the text rather than its contents.


I chose to publish this text in its complete form here, because I can. CBA vol 53 also includes a comic I made, but if you want to read that you’ll have to get the book (link in the beginning of this post). I’ll just give you a small sample here:

I should also mention that the After the Ends of the World concept is something I’ve worked further with in the books with the same name, by me and Susanne Johansson. Current day issues looked at from a future where they were the reason everything collapsed. Part humor, part warning signal…
Both books 1 and 2 are available from Hybriden (and from the regular internet bookstores in Sweden).

First try at risoprinting

Me and Kinga were invited to represent Fanzineverkstaden at a workshop at MaU (Malmö University) today, as part of their Comics Research Lab project.

First time I tried risoprinting and it went much better than expected. I had thought, based on most risoprinted books etc I’ve seen that the colors would be really pale, but it turned out really nicely. Especially since the print I had prepared was 2 colors on top of each other which created a nice effect and much deeper colors.

I made a variation on my tape cover for Noise Against Fascism / Legion of Swine.

Testprint:

First color:

Second color + combination:

Also made a few copies where I printed yellow as the second color:

This is the one Kinga made:

In case you haven’t seen my original image, this is what it looks like: