Me and Suss were interviewed for an article about Wormgod in COdA #15 (the August edition of the zine), re: the release of After the ends of the world 2.
We also made one illustration each for the occasion. Here’s mine:
The zine is free and you can download it to print it yourself. Instructions for how to fold it are included. Feel free to share it with anyone who might be interested.
My latest book is a collaboration between me and Susanne Johansson of Wormgod, and also includes a soundtrack.
Once more we explore the different ways the world ended. From a hindsight perspective we delve into various scenarios to pinpoint the details of the apocalypse.
Comics and illustrated texts from the minds behind Wormgod, a roadmap of things to navigate to come out on the other side of the future. Also a furious description of the world we live and die in now, with all its horrors.
You can buy the book here!
The soundtrack features:
SYSTEMET
NIMAM SPREGLEDA
FACTORY FARMING
TRAUMA COMMAND
FEBERDRÖM
KOEFF
You can listen to the KOEFF track on YouTube.
Both the SYSTEMET and TRAUMA COMMAND track are live recordings from last year’s TRAUMA, for those of you who missed or want to relive it.
And here’s a taste of some of my one-page illustrations/stories:
I’m soon going on vacation, this weird concept that you get when you have employment, where you spend some time not working at all. Employment is rare for me, so it still feels like some kind of novelty. And it won’t be completely without work since we have a CBA release/exhibition on July19 (work being defined as when you do things with a purpose other than pleasure/relaxation, not to be confused with employment where you also get paid).
So I thought I should make some small summation of what I’ve beem doing lately. I should say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ since most of what I do is done in the context of one or more of the collectives I’m part of within the Hybriden constellation…
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Let’s start at the chronological end, with this year’s CRACK! festival (June 20-23) where I was with Kinga Dukaj and Luddvig Melin to represent AltCom/Hybriden/Wormgod/CBK/Tusen Serier and ourselves as artists. If you don’t know, this is one that I’ve been going to every year for the last decade or so, except last year. Which was probably good, because this time it felt better than it has for a while. Less people than usual, but I got some of that magic back, where you meet new people who do interesting stuff, old friends that you only see once or a few times a year (depending on which festivals you go to) who also do interesting stuff, you see lots of cool art, you make some yourself, you’re in this small piece of a possible future/squat paradise on earth called Forte Prenestino to share in the evolution of the comics/printed art underground. It’s a source of inspiration for AltCom and for a lot of what I do and how I do it.
Our cell:
The theme for this year was APERTO (OPEN), similar to the NO BORDERS theme of AltCom 2012, so that fit us well considering what we’re usually publishing.
On June 22 there was also a huge demonstration against evictions of squats as well as against raised rents in general. CRACK! has a natural connection to this since Forte Prenestino is a squat since 1986. I didn’t go to the demo myself because I can’t handle being out in the Italian heat for that long, but rumor says it was a manifestation of around 100 000 people.
I also have to say, without going into details, that the crisis management from the festival organizers is very commendable. They managed to turn an incident into an assembly of around a hundred artists to discuss what had happened. In the end some people disrupted the meeting and I’m not sure where they will go from where it ended, but I fully trust them to handle it in an intelligent way that is respectful to many different aspects of the whole situation.
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A while ago, we opened a new permanent exhibition at Hybriden, with works that have been produced at Fanzineverkstaden by its members and/or workshop participants. It was also, finally, the official release event for Fosfor, our zine distribution system.
The Lore exhibition is still up, with material related to the theme of the latest issue of CBA. The best bet if you still haven’t seen it is to go this week (Wed-Fri 11-15 + Sun 12-15). After that, Hybriden will close for the summer except for the opening of the Qtopia exhibition on July 19 (at Hybriden). As I write this, we’re actually in the final stages of finishing to files for CBA vol 45: Qtopia to send off to the printer.
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We’ll be back in August at Fanzineverkstaden, open weekdays between 15-21, with lots of new workshops coming up during the fall, so keep an eye open for that. And do use the place, because it’s a great opportunity to print stuff and try some new ways for self-publishing, and you never know how long it’ll last (except we know we’ll be here for at least another year). We also brought home some examples from CRACK! to use for inspiration.
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And speaking of things that are being printed as we speak… My contributions to the upcoming Wormgod book, After the ends of the world 2 by me and Susanne Johansson, have largely been produced at Fanzineverkstaden in between my regular working hours. More on that later, but here are a few of the pages from the book that I also showed as prints at CRACK!
Not much work left now before After the Ends of the World 2 is ready to go to the printer.
It’s a bunch of short stories, visions of different versions of the end of the world, with a few longer stories by Susanne Johansson commemorating the victims of three gruesome murders, and a 15 page comic of mine (Why you (maybe) shouldn’t kill Hitler, previously published in CBA vol 40|41). Just like the first book in this series, it will also have a downloadable soundtrack, this time contributed by Systemet, Nimam Spregleda, Feberdröm, Factory Farming and Trauma Command. If you were at TRAUMA last year, you might have seen all of them play there… Published by Wormgod,of course.
I’m planning to put a few samples of it on the blog in the coming weeks before it’s released. I just got word today that Norway, of all countries, just made some changes to their laws, making abortions less accessible (link in Swedish, sorry, you can probably find it in other languages, I don’t have time to google it, even though it’d probably be as fast as writing this). Which sucks, of course. So I felt this one was a good fit for today:
I will be representing Wormgod at SIS (Stockholms Internationella Seriefestival) this weekend (Apr 6-7). The festival is to be found at Konstfack this time.
You’ll find Wormgod next to Tusen Serier and CBK and a few extra tables for individual artists from the groups.
We’ll also receive zines for Fosfor (the zine distro that’s included in the new webshop at Hybriden).
See you there!
The old CBK webshop will soon be taken down, so some links in this blog may be broken.
My books are now available at the new and improved HYBRIDEN webshop.
You’ll also find books from Wormgod, Tusen Serier, CBK and our new zine distro Fosfor.
Enjoy!
There’s a book I’ve been planning to get around to but that may never happen, and I really needed to put out something new and the zinefest called Seriefest is coming up this weekend in Malmö. So I thought: why not take a break from all the paperwork and whatever else I do at work, take an excerpt from the book, rewrite it to work as a stand-alone story, and make a zine out of it?
And here it is, made at Fanzineverkstaden:
But wait, there’s more to it!
I actually made it as one of three submission for the upcoming CBA vol 44: LORE, but one of the others made it into the book and I felt I should do something with this since I went to the trouble of rewriting it and someone should get a chance to read it.
So yeah, now you got the full back story. Happy now?
I will return now the my cave and the boring work stuff waiting for me there. See you at Seriefest this weekend!
I’ve been trying out Procreate on the new iPad Pro at Fanzineverkstaden.
It’s not really a substitute for everything, but still has a bit of range and can be quite useful. Most of all it’s enjoyable and makes me feel lika drawing just for fun, which is something I mostly haven’t done for maybe 20 years.
Anyway, here’s the result of one of them:
I also made a few illustrations that will accompany a text I wrote for the upcoming CBA vol 44: Lore.
Another End of the World…
Homo Sapiens, the last of the various species of human who had walked the planet, had gone too far.
Species after species went extinct at near-unprecedented rates. It was the first Great Extinction that had been caused by one of the living beings inhabiting the sphere.
Mother Earth (aka the planetary ecosystem if you prefer) didn’t have any working evolutionary defense against this race of psychopaths. The problem had to do with the species being suicidal. Normally, that wouldn’t be a surviving trait in the natural selection. It would be bred out and the more cooperating and viable specimen would be the ones most likely to survive. But the suicidal tendency was on such a global scale, and the individuals who were most active in perpetrating this murderous suicide were the ones in power. This meant that those individuals were also the ones most likely to survive, in their bunkers or gated communities or golden skyscrapers.
It was truly a murder-suicide, not only because of the Great Extinction, nor for the global warming that was a consequence of rampant Capitalism, but also because no species can function on its own. We needs company.
In the end, the planetary organism had no choice but to exterminate them. Global warming working like a fever, new and mutating epidemics and viruses as the equivalent of antibodies, weather, disasters and wars taking care of what was left, and humanity finally met its end.
The rest of the planet sighed of relief and went on repairing the damage.
Thus ended the tragic story of the dead-end species and the murder spree that would be its downfall.
There is also the heart-breaking tale of how Homo Sapiens killed off its siblings one by one and then continued this tradition of genocide amongst themselves, but that’s for another bedtime story.
Godd night.
Happy dreams.
A while ago I attended a one day Masterclass at the Malmö University. The object was to create an artist book to be included in an upcoming exhibition at Grafiska Muséet in Helsingborg (though the actual exhibition looks like it’ll be relocated to Gothenburg). It all sounds more fancy than it actually is, I guess. But it was fun!
I chose to make a second volume of A Subtle Fuck You, my series of short story collections (the first one cam back in 2011). It includes three stories; Medication, Fragments and Immunology as well as e previously unpublished image that I call An end with teeth. So what I did during this day was a cover in linocut that I sewed together with a preprinted inlay. It’s a limited edition of 10 copies, so I’m not sure what I will do when I run out of those. Maybe an unlimited edition printed in offset, maybe a second edition of handmades. We’ll see.
I’m usually not a big fan of doing limited editions of my works, but when it’s handmade it kind of comes witrh the territory. Also now with the upcoming FANZINEVERKSTADEN (Zine Workshop), there may be more of this kind of thing because it’s really fun to do and we’ll have all the equipment and it’s my actual job (which still feels really weird to say) to organize the whole thing, together with Kinga Dukaj. We’ve been keeping kind of quiet about it, but now we’re nearing the actual unveiling, so look for more news about it pretty soon…
A Subtle Fuck You 2 (lim ed) is Wormgod book 029.
You can buy it here.
