This Saturday: (Anti)rasism exhibition!

I’m part of (and organizing) an exhibition this Saturday!

Tusen Serier presents:
(ANTI)RACISM
An exhibition with comics about racism.

Place: Fish Tank Gallery / Biograf Panora (Friisgatan 19D, Malmö).
Opening: Jan 21, from 18 until the start of the last movie for the evening.
The exhibition lasts until Feb 19.

Long ago, European countries propagated the notion of white supremacy, of how other races would inevitably perish to make room for the Western European peoples. Today, race is mostly not talked about in that way, but the same notions live on and thrive in many circles, even if expressed in other ways. There is talk of culture, religion and criminality, but there is always an implied image of who has an obvious right to a space and who must always justify their existence, be grateful, obedient and assimilated. Racism is not just about how we look at each other on the streets or at work, but also about how our lives are concretely affected by legislation around migration, discrimination, behavior and culture.

In this exhibition, we showcase comics that look at the phenomenon of racism from different angles. Personal experiences are mixed with theoretical reasoning and visual interpretations.

Participating artists: Ana Biscaia | Julia Nascimento | Felipe Kolb Bernardes | Bekim Gaši & Mauritz Tistelö | Jorge Varas Varilla | Mattias Elftorp

During the opening, you’ll be able to find our latest books, such as Vårdfällan (Raquel Lozano), Mapuche (Jorge Varas Varilla – new 4-language edition!) and Fem Papperslösa Kvinnors Historier (Amalia Alvarez – third edition!) from Tusen Serier, latest issues of CBA, from CBK, and my new Piracy is Liberation 012: Outer Enemy (not officially released until Feb 15)…

The exhibition is organized by Tusen Serier in cooperation with Fish Tank Gallery / Biograf Panora, with support from Malmö Kulturnämnd.

Facebook event

Here’s a sneak peak at my contribution, another Angry Animal story (at some point I’ll probably show the whole thing here, with translation):  

To be continued at the exhibition…

PRE-RELEASE: Piracy is Liberation 012 & Vårdfällan

PRE-RELEASE of 2 new books from Tusen Serier and CBK/Wormgod! These books are only available at Hybriden until Jan 1, 2023. After that they will be taken down from the site until the official release in early 2023 (Jan/Feb)!!!
So take this chance to be among the first to get Piracy is Liberation 012: Outer Enemy and Vårdfällan (Raquel Lozano)!

Piracy is Liberation 012: Outer Enemy by Mattias Elftorp

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?

10 year in the making, this 12th book in the Piracy is Liberation series finally takes us back to the City for 212 pages of a brand new story about a society on the brink of war.

Language: English
Page count: 212
Book type: graphic novel, softcover
Price: 150:- sek
ORDER (contact CBK about review copies!)

Vårdfällan by Raquel Lozano

Alejandra vill egentligen wallraffa, men efter en tids uppehåll är hon nu tillbaka som vårdbiträde inom hemtjänsten. För att klara av sin vardag med duschar, blöjbyten och läggningar varvar hon jobbet med en ny hobby, även om den kanske inte är helt laglig.

Vårdfällan is Raquel Lozano’s debut novel. With Malmö as backdrop, she depicts the life of a young worker, and her struggle to survive an increasingly cold work climate.

Language: Swedish
Page count: 176
Book type: novel, pocket/softcover
Price: 100:- sek
ORDER (contact Tusen Serier about review copies!)

Also new in the webshop:

CBA vol 58: Modern Glossolalia or the Erosion of Meaning (which I edited) and CBA vol 59: Aloneliness (which I only proofread), the latest issues of our international comics anthology!

Mapuche by Jorge Varas Varilla is now available in a new, quadrilingual edition (Mapudungun/Spanish, with subtitles in English/Swedish) (which I translated).

Five Stories About Undocumented Women by Amalia Alvarez has been hard to find for a while, but is now here in a 3rd edition, with new paper stock and still in 3 languages (Spanish/Swedish/English) (which I translated).

Vårdfällan

I made the cover for Vårdfällan, the debut novel by Raquel Lozano, published by Tusen Serier.

The official release will be in early 2023, but it’ll be available in a special pre-release deal at Hybriden already now in December. Stay tuned!

Alejandra vill egentligen wallraffa, men efter en tids uppehåll är hon nu tillbaka som vårdbiträde inom hemtjänsten. För att klara av sin vardag med duschar, blöjbyten och läggningar varvar hon jobbet med en ny hobby, även om den kanske inte är helt laglig.

Vårdfällan är Raquel Lozanos debutroman. Med Malmö som bakgrund skildrar hon en ung arbetares vardag och hennes kamp för att överleva ett allt kallare arbetsklimat.

Asylkalendern 2023

As usual, Asylgruppen i Malmö are publishing their calendar for the next year, and as usual, I made something for it. The theme this time was dreams. They sell these as a way to raise money for what they do, which is help undocumented/asylumseekers in different ways, so it’s a good thing to support!

You can get it from Asylgruppen by sending your
– name
– address
– amount of which calendar
to: asylkalendern [@] gmail [.] com

I made a one-page Arg Kanin story for the week-based calendar. Here’s a panel from it:

Translation:
-You mean where the borders are open and nations dismantled?
-Sure, why not? They’re outdated concepts, anyway.

I also made this image for the month-based calendar. Less political content, but I still liked how it turned out (EDIT: this one didn’t make it into the actual calendar, but I liked how it turned out, so showing it here anyway)):

 

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…

CBA vol 58!

I plan to write something longer about this, like I did with CBA vol 47, but until then, let’s just celebrate the release of CBA vol 58: Modern Glossolalia or the Erosion of Meaning!

Buy it here.

How do we talk when words that used to mean certain things have become so vague that they can be freely appropriated by anyone, for any purpose? And what’s up with the currently so prevalent flirting with war, fascism and the dehumanization of anyone who doesn’t fit into the unspoken and conveniently unspecified national identity?
Objective truth (if there ever was such a thing) and even language itself seems to be sacrificed on the altar of rhetoric and propaganda.
What are the consequences when you can string any random, misspelled words together and people will make their own connections and decide to aggressively either agree or disagree, wholeheartedly even though the sentence actually makes no sense?

Comics by: Tom Mortimer [UK], Daniela Filippin [IT], Jesper Hellvik [DK], Felipe Kolb Bernardes [BR/DE/SE], Radovan Popović [RS], Aleksandar Opačić [RS], Jelle Kindt [BE], Gareth A Hopkins [UK], Mattias Elftorp [SE], Jean Jacques Tachdjian [FR], Helga Gorshe [RU], Miguel Santos [AO/PT], Leviathan [SE], Aiden Kvarnström [SE].
Texts by: Ainur Elmgren [SE/FI], Mattias Elftorp [SE].
Illustrations by: Mattias Elftorp [SE].
Cover & main editor: Mattias Elftorp [SE].

Until I give you something meatier, here’s a page from my comic for this issue, Interrogation:

For this one, I used pages from my upcoming Piracy is Liberation 012: Outer Enemy and changed the dialogue to work as a stand-alone comic.

CBA vol 60 – call for submissions

I’ll be the main editor of CBA vol 60, which is now open for submissions!

Deadline: Feb 1, 2023

For this volume of CBA, we have no theme planned, we just want stories. Maybe we’ll set a theme after the deadline if we can find words to describe the comics we get, maybe we’ll leave it with no title. In any case, send us your comics and we’ll see what happens!

And don’t forget, we also want text articles (with or without illustrations)! If you’ve followed CBA the last few years (which of course you have, why wouldn’t you?), you can probably figure out what kind of material we’re after, even if it’s for an open theme this time.

Go to CBK for more, including submission guidelines.

Good luck, and we look forward to your submissions!

 

Comics competition: Seriefest i Väst

I was one of 12 winners in the Seriefest i Väst (a recent comics festival in Gothenburg) comics competition.

The themes were sustainability, good work conditions and equality, so I submitted this one:

Translation:
ANGRY ANIMAL about SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION

“Sustainable consumption”?
Pha! That doesn’t even exist!
If you have an iPhone, it’s most definitely been built under slavery-like conditions. The same is probably true for any smartphone.

We in the West/North think that we need to have them, and many of us are ready to pay a whole lot of money for it, but that money will first and foremost go to profits for Apple and other corporations, not to whoever actually makes the products.

It’s the same with other electronics, clothes , shoes and whatever else people keep buying all the time. More or less anything we buy has been made for cheap in some other country and been shipped here.
Yes, I know that when people talk about sustainability, it’s not usually about work conditions. But what the hell, us humans are also part of the environment, aren’t we?
And yes, nature will also suffer from the cheap production since the main problem is that companies prioritize profits above any other concerns.

Sure, you can buy ecologic and so on, and that’s good even if it’s more expensive so only those with money can afford to take that responsibility.
And of course none of us should buy more food and stuff than we need, which should be obvious but obviously isn’t.

From all around us we get signals saying that more stuff will make us happy, which takes us back to profit interest as motivation, which is the core of the whole problem.
Individual solutions for sustainability are nice and good, I’m sure, and we can all sit in the shine of our low energy lamps and have a our consciences clean, but it’s far from enough since it’s the overproduction of all kinds of crap which is the real villain.
And that’s all because of profit interest, and the only way we can really achieve sustainability is to get rid of Capitalism!

For fuck’s sake!

The comic will be published in an upcoming issue of Bild & Bubbla.

One exhibition ends, another begins!

Today is the opening for the digital exhibition WAS IT A CAR OR A CAT I SAW at Hybriden.se!

Go see it! I have a piece in it and Kinga Dukaj who is the main editor of the issue and who also made the exhibition did a great job of aligning the exhibition with the dream-like theme of the book. Just try to see it on a computer rather than a phobe or pad or it won’t work properly.

I also have a couple of artworks in the UNCOMICS & [PLACEHOLDER] exhibition at Panora/Fish Tank Gallery, which closes tomorrow with a finissage starting at 18.00!

All these books are of course also available in the shop at Hybriden.se.
Recommended for everyone who prefer readin comics in books rather than on walls/screens: