SIS/SPX14 SHORT REPORT
Yay, it’s already been a couple of weeks since I got back from Stockholm International Comics Festival. It went really quickly and smoothly and I sold crazy amounts of comics and of course piggy postcards, and I met crazy amounts of fun people, and managed to spend a little quality time with my awesome Swedish comics friends. Best SPX Stockholm ever (but I say that every year …).
I shared a table in the big hall with Ainur. It was a bit cramped so I displayed the back issues of my zine Tunguska in a really classy cardboard box, as you can see below … But I actually sold a few of them too. Maybe if this becomes a recurring theme I should bring a nice-looking cardboard box next time.
The biggest hit was of course The Slow and the Relentless. Yay! I’m glad I printed so many. (There’s even a little review already, here.)
Busy signing comics … photo by Thomas Karlsson!
Lucky for us we got a table here by the benches, where there was a little bit of draft. Others complained about how bad the air was in the big hall, but we were okay.
And this is how badass we looked, as usual … photo by Lars-Erik/caltex98!
I always try not to bankrupt myself buying comics there, although the temptation is heavy. But I have self-control of steel. This year’s loot:
Postcards from Mangapatriarkatet (podcast about comics by the awesomepants Lisa Medin and Stef Gaines), porcine poster (“Love Swine, Hate Cops”), Fridas resor by Frida Ulvegren, Dagarna i mars by Stef Gaines, Mitt ex som gjorde slut är sur på min flickvän by Tomas Antila, Aomanjuskogen part 2 by Hisae Iwaoka, Plutonium 11 (I have a piggy comic in it), Rysk afton på de övergivna männens poesiklubb by Andreas Rosengren, C’est Bon Anthology 24 – “Hair” (I have a hairy comic in it :3 ), Människomaskinen by Lisa Medin, weird flyer by Daniel Ahlgren, and a free PDF download of Åtta ben från underjorden #4 by Jenny Hannula!
I also got to meet some newborn chicks and their extended family:
And Lady Oscar:
It was atypically hot and sunny in Stockholm (except on Monday – clearly the whole city was crying because SIS was over ;_;).
But it was still very nice to walk the last bit home through the lush dirt roads of Brandenburg. :3
The Slow and the Relentless zine
56 pages of Soviet truck racing action in the Siberian winter!
Alex is crazy about cars and racing. But this winter her stunt driver mom has dragged her along to the snowy depths of the Russian province, and tells Alex she’s too young to drive in Russia, so she is to stay the hell away from cars. Alex soon discovers that the big thing in Urgunovo is truck racing, and for her new classmates, not having a valid licence is not an issue. However, the races, as well as Karim, the total babe sharing a desk with Alex in school, are ruthlessly dominated by Irka, the mayor’s daughter … Does Alex have what it takes to beat her?!
I finished the comic just in time to print a zine for Stockholm International Comics Festival this weekend. (I don’t have time and also I’m evil, so I won’t post the rest of it online until after the festival. Mua hah haa …)
The theme of this year’s SIS is “representation”, and I guess The Slow and the Relentless fits the theme quite nicely. It’s (obviously) inspired by the Fast and Furious films. While Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner is probably the least annoying “obligatory white male lead in a mostly non-white cast” ever, the trope was more obvious and annoying in Tokyo Drift, with Lucas Black as the boring lead and Bow Wow’s much more interesting character inexplicably relegated to the role of “the funny sidekick”. So I wanted to subvert that trope and write a Fast and Furious type story with a black girl as the main character and a funny white girl as a sidekick/comic relief. Yay! V^(oo)^V
So come get it in Stockholm! My table (shared with my awesomepants sister Ainur) is here:
P.S. I’ve got something else that’s brand new and will be for sale at SIS – piggy postcards! Yay!
Leipzig book fair report / piggy sketch dump
(Not ‘Lepizig’ as I mistyped it at first … not even ‘Lezipig’, although that’s pretty much what I am these days.)
So, this year I had a table in the “artist alley” (MCC-Kreativ) at the Manga-Comic-Convention at the Leipzig book fair. I’d been there once before, way back in 2007, which was a rather disappointing experience, but this year they had allocated a much bigger and more open space for the self-publishers, so I decided to give it another go.
The fair was four days, Thursday to Sunday. Thursday was dead, Friday slightly better, and Saturday and Sunday were pretty good.
For extra awesomepants table decoration purposes I made two big Driftwood posters (with the cover images of Driftwood and Flotsam and Jetsam), and also refurbished a Playmobil ship to look a bit like the Eagle Ray. (You can see Shannon and Samona on board, while Aeron is not visible from this angle: he’s at the wheel and can’t see anything behind the main sail. For the other characters I didn’t really have any Playmobil people that were suitable enough …)
One funny thing about German vs. Nordic comics festival buying culture is that in the North (SPX Stockholm and Helsinki comics festival), the items I place on the corners of the table get most browsing/sales, while I discovered that in Germany (now in Leipzig, anyway) it’s the items in the middle of the table. Above is my initial setup, but after I rearranged my books and put Driftwood and Flotsam and Jetsam in the middle, I sold many more of them.
Also, Germans generally want more of a sales pitch, which is too bad for me. Heh.
Ballpoint pen/watercolour piggies
I’ll write more about the festival soon, but the most important things first! To pass the time at the Leipzig book fair, I sketched a bunch of piggies:
White piggy of the woods
At first I only happened to have blue and green colours with me, so the palette was limited. I actually just wanted to bring the grey colour since I imagined that maybe I could work on The Slow and the Relentless while I was there. But of course it wasn’t really possible to alternate between drawing in concentration and interacting with people, so I just painted piggies instead.
Sunbathing piggy
Territorial piggy
East German piggy dreaming of Sweden (inspired by someone I met there)
Piggy living a life of privilege (piggilege)
Vegetable gardener piggy
An old friend as a piggy
Self-portrait
Kind of self-portrait
Inspired by Beatrix Potter’s Pig-Wig, who I know best from the ballet (which makes me cry)
Later somebody asked me to draw this same piggy picture in her sketchbook. It’s apparently a thing that people pay artists to draw stuff in their sketchbooks at “manga” conventions in Germany. I was extremely confused when the first person who asked me to draw something actually offered money for it. I didn’t know what to ask, but he gave me 5€, so that’s what I charged everybody else who asked.
Private eye piggy
Piggy receiving a love letter
Piggies in Varna, Bulgaria, enjoying the view from the foot of the Soviet-Bulgarian friendship monument
I drew a tiny sketchier version of this on a calling card and it made me cry, so I had to draw a bigger version for myself, so I could cry even more.
Leipziger Buchmesse this week!
From tomorrow until Sunday I’ll be at the Manga-Comic-Convention at the Leipzig book fair and sell my books and zines.
I’ll of course have Driftwood, and also Swedish Comic Sin books as well as zines in German and English.
I made a new German edition of all the Eva stories in their own zines:
Previously the first four stories were in one fat zine, but it’s sold out. Now I discovered that at some point I had translated also the more recent stories into German, so I made new German zines with those. And I updated all the translations, since apparently my German has improved a bit in these seven years since I moved here again.
I have some fun ideas for table decoration, so I hope to make some decent photos … V^(oo)^V
Last time I was in Leipzig was in 2007 for one day, at the claustrophobic manga zine area they had back then. Now the doujinshi area is much larger, more open, and also next to the catering, which is always a plus.
The convention is four full days. I guess some people are staying in Leipzig over the duration of the fair, but the commute from Berlin is just 1,5 hours, which is totally normal commute time for me anyway, so I just got a weekly train ticket and will get to ride awesome ICE fast trains every day.
