Happy International Women’s Day!

I drew the title illustration for this year’s special March 8th issue of Graswurzelrevolution. The lettering on the front banner is by Tine Fetz!

My contributions to the Bilderberg Konferenz V book

Okay, so I guess it figures that the first comic page I draw in a very long time is going to be an entirely self-indulgent thing with piggies and ultra-violence directed at men, in general. This is for the collaboration book for the Bilderberg Konferenz V underground comics festival in Berlin, August 10-11th.


(Larger view)

We always do our own weird take on some topic, and this year the theme is the forgotten and unfinished play “Hanswurst’s Wedding” by Goethe, which seems to be some kind of satire about how disgusting upper class people are etc. In the Bilderberg books it’s even worse, of course, while we tried to creatively include the original text fragments. That also means that the book has to be in German.

The story is basically just that the upper class twit Hanswurst is getting married and the wedding party is just an orgy of all kinds of revolting stuff, while his dad praises him above all heavens.

Goethe never finished the play so we don’t know how it was supposed to end, but this is how I think it should end! A band of women guerillas crash the party and kill everyone (especially/at least the men) in the name of revolutionary expropriation.

The final line is inspired by gothhabiba. And the first slogans they are shouting are inspired by L.D. Bronstein, On Optimism and Pessimism: On the Twentieth Century and on Many Other Issues (1901). Full context:

It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism and civic nirvana.
– Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns.
– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future’.
– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You – you are only the present.

We also drew bizarre portraits of the wedding guests in Basil Wolverton style (or just our own style). Here are mine:


Goethe’s name of the character is Saufaus, which means “drunkard”, but if you add a “t” at the end it becomes “fist of the sow”! So I figured the character is a martial artist who has “Saufaust”/”Fist of the Sow” tattooed on her arm, and scars from an injury have obscured the “t” at the end …


And I thought the character named “Schweinpelz” (“Pig fur”) should just be a very furry boar. V^(oo)^V

Dinner and a Story, December 29th at FIGO


(Click to see it bigger!)

This will be an evening that stimulates all senses equally. The three course dinner is an integral part of an audio-gustatory-olfactory-sensory-visual performance … And it will all be pleasant, so don’t worry.

We will also present some exciting hand crafts made by my mum, textile artist and book binder, as well as some comic books by myself and my sister. Perfect for those christmas gifts that you forgot to buy, or whatever. V^(oo)^V

We’ll charge 10 € for the full experience, including non-alcoholic drinks. (Alcoholic drinks are extra.)

Seating during the performance is limited, so please email me or click “attending” at the facebook event page! (But you can of course drop by later on to just hang out.)

Live drawing at the release party for Serier mot rasism

Last Friday was the release party for Comics Against Racism, a comics anthology that I have the great honour of being part of. Ilan and I offered to do live drawing at the release party. Malmö is so close that we took the morning bus there, drew, and then took the next morning bus back home. Whee!

When we arrived, I got lost, as I always do in Malmö (even during all the years when I lived in southern Sweden and visited Malmö many times). Malmö has new science fiction railway stations, and nowadays you can get off the Denmark trains already at Triangeln. Since I have also gotten used to Berlin’s enormous distances, I was convinced that NOOO, Möllevången CAN’T be that close!!!

So I dragged along Ilan on a long walk in a circle around the entire neighbourhood Möllevången, where we were supposed to go. Maybe I was intuitively drawn to this building:

Vattentornet, Malmö, Sweden
(Photo by Ilana2010 on Flickr)

The water tower that the locals call “kuken” (the dick), as Sofia Lindh later informed us. There were lots of hot hairy guys playing with balls around the base of the dick when we walked past there. :3

In the end we went to an internet cafe full of hairy uncles and checked the map, and realised how close we had been to our destination the whole time, as Malmö is in fact a quite small city. Duuuh.

We checked out the final exhibition of the Malmö comics school, and there we also came across Henri Gylander, who recommended for us to go to the lovely Anarchist book store Amalthea bokkafe, where they had delicious vegan food, wifi, and also a little release party for the latest issue of Mattias Elftorp’s comic Piracy is Liberation. There was even a nice doggie.

Eventually we went back to the venue, Restaurang Bodoni, and set up the Tagtool. Bizarrely enough, we had no technical problems whatsoever. So we started to draw a bit, and at some point people turned on the lights and cleaned up, and we were, like, “What, is it already over?”

I totally lose my mind when I’m drawing, and since we for some reason didn’t take any breaks at all, I pretty much didn’t notice that there actually were other people in the room.

Så, öh, jag vill be om ursäkt till alla underbara människor som jag totalt ignorerade … FÖRLÅT! (T_T)

Here are some photos and screenshots of what we drew:

The wild piggy who loves to ride his scooter. But traditionally it’s a sport for domesticated piggies, and the domesticated piggies who ride scooter ridicule and despise the wild piggy and tell him he can’t ride at all …

The hypno toad

The piggy in the tree house

The piggy in the hammock

The cosmonaut piggy

Okay, you get the pigture …

Ilan drew, too, but I’m so egocentric that I totally forgot to make any screencaps of his stuff as I animated it. :o(

The by far most fun part of the bus trip, which went partly across the sea on a ferry, was that the Russian school ship Sedov was docked in Rostock!!! ♥

Note the sailors working in the rig …

This is what I looked like for hours after seeing Sedov, both on the way out and on the way home.

* * *

Big (pig) thanks to Sofia Lindh, Henri Gylander, Emelie Stigwan and Robert Pettersson for putting together this anthology, especially to Henri for being excited about our live drawing and Sofia for wonderful tea and conversations as we hung out a bit, before we took the train back to catch our bus in Copenhagen. Piggy thanks also to Frida Ulvegren and her stand-up comedy with an “Argh! Nooo!” kind of humour, as well as the bands Slag Från Hjärtat and Mango Bi Family and DJ Joakim Derlow, who provided challenging topics for which to draw (piggies).

5. Tagtool Session at Café Wendel

Andreas Dzialocha talked me into doing some live drawing with the tagtool at Café Wendel, where they have a regular event (once a month) that brings together tagtool artists and musicians for improvised sessions.

Both me and Karotoons, who did the animation, had only used the tagtool maybe once before, and none of us had ever worked together or even met before, so it was really totally extreme improvisation. And lots of fun!

Getting started with the setup with Andreas Dzialocha and Roman Hagenbrock.

(All photos here were taken by Eija Elmgrén.)

There had been some problems with the tagtool box and tablet recognition, and my tablet didn’t work either, but one of the two backup tablets Andreas brought did. Phew! However, it lost the pressure sensitivity just before the performance begun. I figured I could just adjust my style to that …
(Continue reading …)

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