I survived Stockholm SPX10

I wrote a long report about it in Swedish for the Epix blog, with lots of photos, too. You can check it out over there.

(Photo by Stef Gaines)

I sold my self-published comics zines and also represented my publisher Epix, sharing a table with Ainur and the Evil Mochi Dummy. My zines were perhaps a bit overshadowed by my “real book”, but that’s okay, I guess.

As always it was great fun, and since the festival just keeps getting better and better every year, it was more fun than ever before. Not least because I personally know more and more comix industry people every year, so I’m not nervous about going there anymore, like I was the first time I attended and didn’t know anyone.

Lots of amazing events and epic meetings took place, but they were all overtrumped by the totally astonishing discovery I made when the festival was over and we were packing our stuff: a secret admirer had left their underwear under my chair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! With pubic hair and everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fancy underwear, too.

So I got a nice frame for them and will hang them in a special place on my wall. ♥

Thank you, Mr. Secret Admirer.

* * *

I got that frame from the Euro-Flohmarkt on Schönhauser Allee, near U2 Vinetastraße. It’s a really nice place, a big yard inside an old factory complex, with all kinds of crap, from millions of mugs over tools, rusty sewing machines and coal stoves to really very nice antique furniture and old doors, with very decent prices. There is an invisible doggie behind a wall who barks if you come too close to the wall. The people who run it are really nice, too, and when I also bought a pair of coffee cups the guy noticed that one of them was broken, and went to find me two even nicer ones.

I first tried to find a frame at the hipster heaven at the Sunday market in Mauerpark, but the only frames in the right size I could find came with stupid paintings or lithographies and were priced at 25-50 € … Nooooo.

I actually noticed that nice junkyard yesterday when I was one of the 10.000 people – antifa and union activists, local politicians and not least regular residents of this neighbourhood, who drove out the couple hundreds of Neo-Nazis who had organized a demonstration on Bornholmer Straße, on Labour day of all days. They had planned to march about six kilometers, but after only a few hundred meters and massive opposition from counterdemonstrators and residents of the surrounding buildings, the police decided to turn them back and escort them out of Berlin.

I have never been this proud to live in Prenzlauer Berg.