I KNOW WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER
Many people go through their lives and never build a shed. I am not one of those people.
I tragically had to give up my beloved DDR Trailer Trash garden, but early this summer I got another garden by a stroke of luck. It has a perfectly normal little house on it, in a bit of disrepair, but still quite bourgeois even, with fancy things like electricity and running cold water. The garden is big and has lots of potential, and it’s right next to a small river.
This first summer and autumn I’ve been planting lots of new trees and shrubs and fighting the extreme heat and drought. And also I built a shed with a workshop/toolshed and a compost toilet, which is what this post is all about!
Behind the house there was already a concrete foundation, probably from an old shed that was torn down at some point. There was also a stash of used lumber, and other trash laying around, such as windows and rain gutters. So I didn’t have to make a new foundation, and I only had to buy part of the building materials.
I’d done some repairs and built some smaller things, but I’d never built anything near a whole shed before. Basically I learned everything from the Internet, reading many different, good and bad, tutorials, while deciding on a design. (Special thanks to theoblackadder for his instructables, showing how to build pretty advanced stuff all on your own.)
Since I didn’t have electricity in my old garden, I’d only used hand powered tools before, but now I got an electric drill/screwdriver, which was a very good thing to have for this project, where thousands of screws were drilled! I almost killed myself with the sawing, though.
For starters, I sawed the huge 10×10 cm corner posts and the bottom and top beams for the side walls to the correct length. This is where I almost killed myself, sawing seven pieces of that dense, thick wood with a mere handsaw. One day I almost gave up, but then my neighbour invited me for coffee, and soon after getting all jacked up on his coffee I had somehow finished all the beams. Then I painted them.
10 Years of Hourly Comics
All my hourly comics from the last ten years collected in one book!
February 1st is Hourly Comic Day – the day when artists draw a comic for every hour that they’re awake. These ten years of hourly comics provide glimpses on evolving art styles, changing relationships, dreams, fantasies, hurt and recovery, doggies, piggies and the mundanities of unglamorous Berlin life – mouldy walls, coal stoves, the m41 bus and all.
108 pages, black&white interior, A5 size.
You can get it at Stockholm International Comics Festival, May5th-6th, or order directly from me (6 € + postage).
Comics production of 2015-2017
I didn’t count my production since December 26th 2014, so here it is for the last three years. I felt like I didn’t draw anything at all except Sweet Peas, because of too much other shit to do, depression, and unfavourable living environments.
Number of pages and panels I have drawn since December 27th 2014:
– Hourly Comics Day 2015, 6/11
(The page where I’m naked in the shower is the 1000th comics page I have drawn!! Yay!!! V^(oo)^V)
– Piggy after the Apocalypse, 1/3
(I wrote one full script and one revised partial script, and drew one page, then I didn’t like it that much and part of it merged into Sweet Peas. But one fun thing about this comic was that the setting was Berlin but I changed all the place names and street names into piggy related names. Berlin -> Eberlin, Schönhauser Allee -> Schönsauer Allee, etc. …)
– Driftwood alternate ending/Gateshead Alternative Universe, 9/29
– Untitled ‘Aeron’s first girlfriend’ flashback story, 5/15
(I didn’t think it was original or funny enough to ever publish … until now, but only in Swedish, because while it’s funnier than I remembered, it’s still not good enough for me to bother translating it!)
– Cerebus cover for the 2015 Bilderberg zine, 1/5 (see below)
– Hourly Comics Day 2016, 8/19
– Black Dog On My Shoulder, 1/1 (see below)
– Sweet Peas/Sockerärter, 73/179
– Warmup piggy comics, 2/8
– Garfield cover for the 2016 Bilderberg zine, 1/1 (see below)
– Blue dress diary comic fragment, 1/3 (see below)
– Period diary comic fragment, 1/3 (see below)
– Christmas in Friedrichshain, 25/62
– Hourly Comics Day 2017, 11/33
– Snigelvännens trädgårdstips, 2/6 (published in Serienördens trädgårdsbok)
– Inktober 2017, 8/8
I’m pretty sure there were some more sketchy comics and one-panel-drawings, because I have more sketchbooks and stashes of drawings in my trailer, but probably nothing too significant.
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155/386
(All-time total as of today: 1150/5092)
It’s not terribly much but it’s more than I thought. :<
I also wrote several finished scripts during these years, for short story and “graphic novel” length comics, but I didn’t have the discipline or faith in them to make them into comics. In some cases I might still return to them …
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My Cerebus and Garfield covers for the Bilderberg zines in 2015 and 2016. The Garfield one was based on the title panel of this strip, an old favourite from my childhood …
(My attempt at) Inktober 2017
I decided to try to do Inktober this year as a kind of diary comic, with one picture from each of my days in October.
