Category: Wormgod

New zine for Seriefest

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?

Angered, Gothenburg

I will return now the my cave and the boring work stuff waiting for me there. See you at Seriefest this weekend!

Test creature

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.

Dead-end species

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 Subtle Fuck You 2 (lim ed)

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.

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.

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…

Noise against fascism

Sound Disturbance is coming up this weekend (Feb 10-12). I will represent Wormgod in a collaboration with Noise Against Fascism in a harsh noise/visual performance on Saturday. There’s a bunch of gigs/sound art performances that start 1930. We are part of that schedule but I don’t know what exact time it’ll be, so you should come for the whole thing.

noiseagainstfascism_postr

The Wormgod exhibition After the ends of the world (from AltCom 2014 + the book of the same name) will also be shown at the event, including the soundtrack (in some form or another) by Dekoder, Nimam Spregleda, Feberdröm, Knullkraft and Concrete Threat.

wormgod067herfierybreath

…long live the new flesh!

New year, new plans. Here are a few mentions of future stuff…

UPCOMING GRAPHIC NOVELS:
En Andra Chans (Tusen Serier) by me and Shko Askari
Sagor från Angered (working title) (Tusen Serier & Blå Stället) by me, Amanda Casanellas & Segal Mohammed
Piracy is Liberation v03 (Wormgod) IF I can only find the time for this, it’d definitely be about time to finally be able to continue this story…

EXHIBITIONS:
Cool Cykel (Tusen Serier presents Tanja Komadina) in February
I don’t want to dream (CBK presents Spyros Verykios and CBAvol36) in May

MORE BOOKS:
Berättelser om Yunnan – minnen från kulturrevolutionen (Tusen Serier) by Emei Burell
CBAvol36: In the pits of madness (CBK) with me as main editor, really excited about this one…
CBAvol37: Fragments (CBK)

FESTIVALS:
I’ll probably be going to the usual ones, maybe something new, we’ll see (preliminary dates)…
Copenhagen Comix (Feb)
SIS (May)
CRACK! (Jun)
Helsinki (Sep)
Novo Doba (Oct)

+ VARIOUS OTHER STUFF
It’s too early to tell yet, but we have some big plans for Hybriden. More news when we know if they will actually happen…