Today, the new Tusen Serier exhibition opens at Hybriden.
It’s a sci fi project about border politics that also touches on other subjects. It was started by Open Art Week as a collaboration between Tunisian and Italian comic creators, as the first of (so far) two such exhibitions. We got the opportunity to join and expand upon their concept with artists from the network connected to Tusen Serier and Hybriden.
The showcased artists in the Tusen Serier edition are: Elida Maiques Korina Hunjak Julia Nascimento Felipe Kolb Bernardes Leviathan Ana Biscaia Amalia Alvarez and me
It’s been some work with coordination, programming etc, but it feels real good to be part of this project.
Here are a few panels from my contribution:
To be continued in the exhibition…
La nuova frontiera (The new frontier) was initiated and produced by OPEN ART WEEK. In partnership with: Biblioteca delle Nuvole (IT), Lab619 (TN), Fokus Illustration (CH) Tusen Serier (SE), Hybriden (SE). Artistic coordination: Claudio Ferracci and Abir Gasmi. The Tusen Serier edition of The new frontier is presented with support from Malmö Kulturnämnd.
Since it’s May 1 today, which is celebrated all over the world in remembrance of the murdered Haymarket anarchists and the struggle in general of the international working class…
Anyway, here’s my latest published illustration work: cover + illustration in the latest issue of Portuguese journal of anarchist expression: A Batalha #291.
The same Kropotkin portrait will also be included in an upcoming issue of the Swedish anarchist magazine Brand, and I also made print of a variant on the same image, which you can buy from Hybriden:
Ihor Homenyuk was a Ukrainian immigrant in Portugal who was beaten and asphyxiated to death by SEF border police while locked up in a detention centre awaiting deportation.
Maybe one day we’ll get to remember victories instead of death and defeat…
In a few ways, it feels wrong to use this post to try to sell stuff, and also trying to sell a portrait of an anarchist. On the other hand… This is the first day of my latest period of unemployment, so that’s a thing. And I was really happy with how it turned out so I thought maybe someone else will also like it, and they’re not free to print, and I did the published illustrations for free, and it’s not uncommon for anarchists to want people to get paid for their work. And… It may sound like I’m defending myself to whoever is reading this, but I’m pretty sure I’m defending it more to myself. I have a complicated relationship with money (and work).
At least I’m not one of those fucking assholes who are refusing to release the patents for (I was going to say COVID, but that’s faar from the only one) vaccines etc in order to maximize their profits.
“Bring Back The Age Of The Guillotine” to quote Khmer Noir… Here’s a little something from them to cheer you up and celebrate the day:
My latest published comics work is a 2 page story in Alkom ‘ X 11 HellHeaven
About the book: 17 x 25 cm, 7 hand stitched notebooks 102 pages, 1 lino, 1 stamp board Lino cover lost plate 2 passages Printing 150 screen prints on 4 different papers price: 19 euro artists: David Paleo, Kapreles, Радован Поповић, Crippa Almqvist, Zeke Clough, Zven Balslev, Muriel Bellini, Jeff Gaither, Dan Michiu, El Rughi, Mattias Elftorp, Denis GRRR Art, Scarlatin Taipan , Audrey Faury, Jean-Jacques Tachdjian, Paul Boswell, Alkbazz Garagel, Tommi Musturi, Alain Marciano, Herve Andre, Gabriel Delmas, Gene Mutation, Marcel Ruijters, Craig Earp, Xenoid, Reijo Kärkkäinen, Olaf Ladousse , Concrete Cité… The Garage L., Branquignols Publishers, 2021
They recommend that you order it directly from the editor, Alkbazz: alkbazz(at)free.fr but it’s also possible from Etsy.
I’m not very good at bragging. Mostly I just tell people (= blog about, post some link somewhere) about things I’ve been involved in and hope for the best, but I’m going to give it a try here, because far too few people bought CBA vol 47 that I was the main editor of (which I know because I’ve seen the orders).
I’m not even marketing my own stuff here, mostly, and I don’t make any money from the sales, so it’s self-less bragging, really. I do this for you. So here goes:
One of the things I did make in this volume was the cover, and I’m really happy with it. It’s a combination of a linocut print, a scan of the plastic sheet I used to mix the paint when I did the print, the old circuitboard I scanned and used for Piracy is Liberation after finding it at the dump in Skellefteå in the 1990s, and maybe some other random structures I had lying around. The letters of the title are left-overs from someone’s (Kinga’s?) lino cut-outs for something. Anyway, I had fun doing it and think it worked pretty well as a cover.
The first comic, by Avi Heikkinen was the winner of the comics competition in Oulu where I was one of the judges (because I got the honorary prize the year before). I really liked how it’s look of photo-based drawings worked well with the story about a camera that can look into the past, and a film-maker who becomes obsessed with it.
Next up is a comic I wrote and compiled, based on a nightmare that Kinga Dukaj had, built out of one of my favorites of her artworks. It’s one of those dreams where you dream that you wake up but then realize you’re still in the dream, then you wake up but realize you’re still in a dream and so on. Layer by layer. Scary stuff that made for a scary story that fit really well with her photomanipulation of a tree growing out of a skull.
Then there’s Danijel Žeželj. Danijel fucking Žeželj, just to emphasize, because not enough people have seen his works. And a lot have, because he’s worked on X-men, Superman and a whole lot of other stuff, self-published and at big publishers. I first heard about him from the Stripburger crew when they were visiting Malmö in 2005 and talked about Stripburger in particular and Balkan comics in general. I saw Žeželj’s stuff and immediately fell in love! First time we published him in CBA was later that year, or maybe the year after. We distributed a few copies of his book Small Hands, which is sadly out of print now, I think, but it’s one of my favorite comics. Anyway, it’s always great to have his stuff in one of our books and you should check him out if you don’t already know his works.
After discovering Balkan comics, I found Komikaze, a Croatian web-based anthology, and in Komikaze I found a bunch of artists that we also published back in the day. One of which is now a friend of mine that I meet maybe once or twice year (pre-covid, when we could go to festivals), which is far too seldom; Radovan Popović. His art style here is based on chaotic paintings/collages, evocative and dark and beautiful. In this case a story connected to Philip K Dick, inspired by the Science/Fiction theme.
Another artist originating in the Balkans but living in Canada at the time is Ivana Filipović. I may be mistaken but I don’t think I found her but rather she found us. She sent a comic to the AltCom anthology of 2018, which she said was the first comic she made in about 20 years. A great honor and I’m glad she started again because I really like her stuff. Mostly straight-up drawings, and this is no different. She picked up on the religion-related part of the theme, with a fun/dystopic sci fi twist. Edit: Turns out she found us when Radovan shared a link about CBA. So there you go, it’s all connected somehow…
Korina Hunjak, another Balkan artist, but one that I’ve had less personal contact with, made this one. The ”where is the line between the living and the artificial” robot story is a classic, and one I often find interesting. This one is thematically reminiscent of the game Detroit: Become Human (which I replayed recently, by the way. Great game).
Francisco Sousa Lobo is a friend of a friend in Portugal. I have a couple of his books published by Portuguese comics network/publisher/association Chili Com Carne, and they’re always interesting, mostly low-key storytelling with simple lines that don’t necessarily betray the dark undertones of the stories. This one is no exception, and I think it’s a good sample of what he’s doing. You should check him out!
Last but not least, one of the founding members of CBK, Oskar Aspman, got inspired to make a new comic in his way that is often abstract in story, expressive in line-work, apocalyptic in mood. Always a pleasure.
And I also wrote a few illustrated text pieces, one about the construction of identity, one about something I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few years: how we seem to be living in an increasingly fictionalized world, in the post-truth era that former US president Trump is such a great champion for. It’s interesting and pretty frightening depending on the kind of dystopic fiction we often end up living in…
So that’s it. Maybe none of this sounds like something you’d like and then you should probably stay away. But if you’re anything like me and it sounds like something for you, give it a try (buy it here)! This is one of my favorite issues in recent years, and not just because I was so involved in putting it together, but because I think it’s really good!
By the way, if you want a wide variety of comics in style and content, why not get a subscription? It’s an extra good idea to get it now, before we will have to to raise the price due to increased postage costs. If you’re like me, you like things that are high-quality and low-price, so if you make sure you get your subscription before mid-April, you’ll get a better deal (not that it’s going to get super expensive after that, but still)!
CBA vol 52: BURNOUT Main Editor: Mattias Elftorp DEADLINE: Feb 15 Burnout has become an increasingly normal part of everyday life for many of us since the term was getting widespread use in the late 1900s. From hospital staff to comic creators to basically any job in the gig economy. Anyone who doesn’t have a steady income, or who is expected to do more work in less time than is reasonable, can feel this. So who is to blame? Could we create a situation, a systemic change, to avoid the conditions that cause burnout? What we’re looking for aren’t necessarily stories of depressing social realism, but artistic expressions of that feeling, suggestions for solutions, wishful thinking and visual abreactions. Expressions of rage rather than apathy, insurrection rather than complicity. Something to read for strength in times of austerity.
CBA vol 53: PLACEHOLDER Main Editor: Leviathan DEADLINE: Mar 31 The pandemic paused the world for an indefinite time. What does that mean practically? What does it do to our consciousness and how we experience our existence? Some places see recovering wildlife and cleaner air. Which other phenomena appear to replace our old routines? We’re waiting, and in our wait, we imitate the “real” we hope will soon return. We are like placeholders in our own lives.
Was planning to publish the usual list of things I’ve read/seen/played this year, but I’m mentally tired so it’ll come later.
By the way, the theme for CBA vol 52 will be BURNOUT. Look for a call for submissions to be published in the coming days…
Hey, remember when everyone thought that 2016 was the worst year ever? Those were the times… I never really got into that way of looking at it. Years are artificial and things getting worse or better is a process. Even though 2020 has been exceptional in many ways, it’s not an isolated thing but a culmination of several processes and probably the start of others. Maybe the best thing we can learn from this year is that the short-sightedness and profit-maximization that Capitalism encourages are things we need to grow out of.
So good luck and I’ll be back with some escapism in a little while.
I made this illustration for Portuguese illustrated christmas paper, Jornal de Natal (The Inspector Cheese Adventures, Xerefé, Flagrantetítulo – Associação Cultural) organised by Ana Biscaia and André Ruivo.
Here’s the text that accompanies it in the book. I wrote it earlier this year, but it’s of course still current since some change comes reeeaaally slow, if at all.
ALL CATS ARE BEAUTIFUL (or ACAB)
So it happened again, on May 25 of 2020. Another name added to the list of people who were murdered by Police. I won’t mention his name here because I won’t mention any names because there are too many. I won’t mention his skin color because he was a human being first and foremost, but also because you already know. We still remember him and his last moments.
I should perhaps mention here that I am White and I live in a segregated little country called Sweden. I may not be completely segregated personally, not completely socially unconnected to the groups of people who are usually the victims of Police violence, but I don’t think I personally know anyone who has been killed by cops.
Abused in some way by police? Sure, lots of people, including friends, friends of friends, family, loose aquaintances and myself at one point. Most of it political, some of it in enforcement of what I’d call racist legislation concerning migration (which is also political) and some for other reasons.
But murdered by Swedish Police? Not as much. I think the closest one was a relative of an ex of mine. They don’t do that as much in Sweden as in some other countries, even though it’s not unheard of. But the thing is that US culture is also our culture in many ways. The current US president may wage an internal culture war against anything left of the Republicans at the moment, but internationally, they won years ago. We in the rest of the world watch US TV and movies, eat food from US food chains, play US games, read US books and comics, it’s everywhere. I even use mostly US English even though the one I learned in school was the British one. Sure we miss a lot of nuance and we only get the surface of it. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to live in the US, we haven’t felt it in our bodies. But we identify with US culture, and part of that comes in the form of transferred race relations.
I’m not saying this to exonerate us in any way. We have contributed lots to the ingrained racism ourselves, we can’t blame Hollywood for that. But when we see cops murder Black people in the US in the news and social networks, we feel kind of like it’s happening here. In part because the same things are also happening here on a smaller scale, but also because we’re all affected by US politics. Through wars and the tentacles of their capitalist practices and reproduction of the class system they’re so good at maintaining (even though we at least still have comparatively free health care).
So it happened again. And again. And again. And it felt like it happened to us, because Sweden isn’t all White, you know, just largely segregated, and our history classes probably taught us more about slavery in the US than US children learn in school. And this time the name and the reactions got bigger. This time it was the drop that made the glass spill over, just like it was those other times. The name and the reaction got so big this time that maybe. Just maybe. Maybe this time was going to be different. Maybe something would actually change. Even though it didn’t in any of those other cases.
But even after that last big name, there were more people killed. Some of it was political, people getting shot to death at protests. Some of it were traffic stops or other misdemeanors. Driving while Black. Breathing while Black. The names kept piling up and for each one the newsworthiness diminished and most of them probably went completely under the radar for the people whose local communities weren’t directly affected.
Because All Cops Are Bastards. And by that I mean that they largely get away with whatever they do. They can use excessive force with no repercussions. They can harass innocent people with no repercussions. They can kill with no repercussions. The exceptions to this rule are too few to make a difference.
As I started writing this text there was an incident in Sweden where some truck driver got a cop’s baton shoved up his ass, and it was ruled that it had to have been either an accident or a warranted police action. The court didn’t determine which one it was but it didn’t matter as long as the cop and his commanding officer were innocent. Which only seems likely in a world where anything a cop does is automatically defensible. Too bad that’s the world we live in.
All Cops Are Bastards. It may sound like a harsh statement, but let me explain:
Even if the bad ones really are just a number of individual cops, that means that the rest of them are either quietly approving or, in at least a few cases I hope, actively resisting. And the ones that are approving of racist or violent behavior, or even quietly disagreeing, are part of the problem. The ones that are resisting (though I hear that’s really hard to do from within the corps) will be aware enough that it’s a systemic problem that they will know what we mean when we say that All Cops Are Bastards. As the saying goes: a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
Because it is a systemic problem, which means that it’s not enough to punish a couple of cops who went too far. No amount of measures are enough until Black people don’t need to be afraid of being killed by cops for existing on the streets, at work or even in their homes. It’s not enough until some nedlessly upset White people can no longer use a 911 call as a potential murder weapon. Which goes for both the US and for Sweden.
Some people seem to believe that there is no racism anymore, because slavery was officially abolished in the US, because the Nazis lost the second world war or because most countries (looking at you, Israel) don’t have any official laws demanding racial segregation. But it’s only possible to still believe that while looking at, for example, the statistics for incarceration and police killings in the US if you see those numbers through a lens that says that Black people by nature are more likely to commit crimes. Same goes for the unequal distribution of wealth. And I’m sorry to break it to you, but that is by definition a racist lens.
Combine racism, a disdain for the poor and widespread misogyny with a police force that not only is immune to repercussions but in many ways has the same mentality as a criminal gang or a bunch of bullies, and what do you get? A situation where All Cops Are Bastards and where Black Lives don’t Matter. Which means that All Lives don’t Matter. Which is something that everyone should care about, even those who aren’t personally directly affected in their daily lives.
White people aren’t of course immune to violence from the police. White people are just not subjected to violence or suspicion BECAUSE they are White. Which is an important distinction that does not contradict that we all have everything to gain from joining forces to make changes, because maybe another world is possible. One without class differences, without racism and without police brutality. One where that list of names doesn’t keep growing.
