Report from Zinefest Berlin 2012
I’ve been really bad at reporting from festivals this year, but now I’ll make an effort to better myself in that respect!
It was my first time at Zinefest Berlin (last year it coincided with the festival in Gothenburg), and I was a bit nervous that it would be full of hipsters who would only consider getting my comics zines in an ‘ironical’ way. But while the hipster density was somewhat high, there was still plenty of metalheads and nerdy and/or leftish people (my usual readership – people who are like me, I guess V^(oo)^V) who were interested in my zines in an honest and straightforward way.
I was superlucky and got such a beautiful table that I didn’t have to use my tablecloths:
There were quite many English speaking people, so I brought both my German and my English zines, and made little piggy signs:
At one point one person insisted on paying 2 € for the German edition of The Muggers (that I sold for only 1 €). That confused me so much that I tried to offer him the English edition instead, since it’s bigger, has thicker paper and actually costs 2 € … But he really wanted the German edition and he really wanted to pay 2 € for it. O_o
Someone else, who bought both of the German Eva zines, commented that she liked my stuff a lot and that it’s unusual to find both good stories and good drawings in the same comics. *Sigh*! <3
I sold several zines down to the last copy, so I guess I have to make more …
What happens when you don’t drink alcohol:
On Sunday, almost everybody else came a couple hours later than our schedule said, perhaps because they had been partying until 5 AM the night before …
During that deadtime I read a book on Russian art history that was lying around on the shelf behind my table (the festival was held in the rooms of the Berlin School for Adult Education). There were some comics in that book:
“How the mice buried the cat”, 18th century. Another comic featured was one of Mayakovsky’s Rosta windows. (More …)
Anyway, I sold surprisingly much, and I also traded for some interesting zines, like Meeresbande Zine (about living with disassociative identity disorder) and a couple of pretty comics zines by Lilli Loge.
As usual I did little sketches while attending my table, mostly of visiting doggies and random piggies.
Summer of 2012
So, today I moved into my winter residence. Time for a summer summary:
What grew particularly well:
– Cucumber. Besides pickle cucumbers, I tried a bitter-free F1 hybrid greenhouse cucumber, and while that is in some ways evil (not least because you can’t save the seeds!), they tasted really awesomepants and were extremely productive. They very much enjoyed the watering system I set up with unglazed terracotta pots buried in their pots.
Leading the reading
I have no formal education in arts or drawing comics, and a lot of my comics making happens unconsciously. Things I do are good if it just “feels right” or “makes sense” and bad if it “feels wrong”. Sometimes it can take a day or even a week until I find a solution to why something wasn’t working. At such times, I wish I knew more about the theory of making comics, so that I could know exactly why something isn’t working …
One thing I’ve started to pay attention to is how to lead the reader’s eyes across the page.
I started to notice how I do this during the editorial process of my Swedish Comic Sin anthology contribution. The books are made through collective self-publishing, and before the book is put together, everybody can critique each others’ comics and offer advice on what doesn’t work and how something could be better. Several of my fellow artists had problems with my frequent use of this type of layout:
It’s very common in Japanese comics – that’s where I picked it up – and I like to use it because it allows for variety in the layouts. However, there are great risks of a culture clash when Europeans read this type of layout!
In Japanese comics, the reading order is strictly set as demonstrated above, and I can’t remember ever having seen the rules being broken. But in the rare cases when European comics use it, there are no fixed rules for the reading order, so artists often use arrows to point out the (to me often ‘illogical’) reading order. So when European readers are confronted with it and have no arrows to help them, they can get confused.
Now, I could scoff at them for being illogical and uneducated … Or I could compose my panels in such a way that there is no confusion regarding the reading order.
The page most people had a problem with was one where I’d sketched one crucial panel wrong, but didn’t bother fixing it before I sent out the sketches to the editorial collective:
Blue arrows: geometry (shapes, perspective etc.)
Red arrows: faces (and to some degree body language) of characters
Green arrows: speech bubbles and captions
This is how I fixed it in the final version:
I composed panel 5 in a radical “<” shape, picking up the lines from panel 4 and redirecting them towards panel 6.
If I did it today I may even have changed the cabinet on the wall in panel 4, since it has unnecessarily confusing horizontal lines that point towards panel 6 …
I’m not exactly a master of this trade, and I have a lot of room for improvement. But for everyone’s education I will post some more examples behind the cut, from my comic Driftwood!
Zines for the Finns
In preparation for Helsinki Comics Festival this weekend, I expanded my arsenal with three more English language zines!
I’ve been a bit lazy with the English paper comics. Previously I only had my two most recent 24 h comics as zines in English, White Nights and The Muggers.
Hourly Comics Day 2012 is obviously my hourly comic from this year. It was so epic and porcine that it had to be made into a zine.
16 pages, A6. V^(oo)^V
The Compass Rose is the long-awaited English translation of this (very) short spinoff story from Driftwood, about Aeron back when he was more confused. In spite of my “enormous nose” artistic phase at the time I drew it, it’s one of my prettier comics. Though when I look at it now I’m confounded that his ex-girlfriend looks so “Caucasian”, when she’s supposed to be of clearly African descent (but has albinism) … x_X White-washing my own characters, eh …
In any case I would really like to draw a much longer comic about her (as herself, not as his girlfriend).
12 pages, A5.
Yess, the latest and longest Eva story is now also in English! One night Eva is assaulted by some Nazi-Darwinists. She beats them to pulp and doesn’t think much of it, but what if it did lead to some disastrous consequences, after all? In this story, Eva – who normally prefers to be a “one woman army” – actually teams up with the hot gangster The Leopard, who collects the debts off Eva’s toyboy Ting Yay and his sister. But what will Ting Yay think about that??!!!
44 pages, A5.
I’ll be sharing a table with my eminent sister Ainur. We will also be selling Swedish Comic Sin 2 and 3 (I participated in #3, Ainur in both :3 ), and Ainur will have fabulous zines with her comic Goldenbird! And I guess we’ll also have some pins and maybe other little things.
We’ll be in the Small Press Heaven (Pienlehtitaivas). See you there …? V^(oo)^V
