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 …
Rubber cut prints
For a little group exhibition that I was part of in December, I made a couple of rubber cut prints. You can buy blocks of stamp rubber and cut it like lino cuts, except it’s a lot softer and easier to work with. These two are the first rubber cuts I’ve ever made.
They are kind of part of a comic I’m working on, about the migrant experience and what it does to your sense of identity when the first generation – your parents – tried to assimilate and rejected their culture and heritage, and also your parents were shit, and meanwhile the majority culture around you is biased against your people. And here you are, not belonging anywhere and trying to figure out what is good and right to you.
The sûra “The Bee” (النّحل) mentions how Allah “inspired the bee, saying: Choose thou habitations in the hills and in the trees and in that which they thatch; Then eat of all fruits, and follow the ways of thy Lord, made smooth (for thee).” An interesting thing is that the Arabic verb form used for the bees is indeed the female form, so already in the early 7th century it said in the Qurân correctly that worker bees are all female.
In “The Bee” there is also a passage that seems to condemn “unbelievers” for having a bias against baby girls, for being unhappy when daughters are born to them and considering to kill their female babies.
The sûra talks about honeybees, but the bumblebee is my favourite bee, and there has been controversy about whether it should even be able to fly according to the laws of physics (though that has been proven to be incorrect – yes, bumblebees can fly and it is in full accordance with the laws of physics …).
This one is a view of the Khadidja Mosque of the Ahmadiyya community in Berlin-Heinersdorf (although I forgot to cut it as a mirror image!). Like many mosques in Germany, it’s in an unseemly industrial area, behind a KFC, a gas station and a car repair shop.
The Ahmadiyya community also built the first mosque in Berlin, the beautiful Wilmersdorfer Moschee, which was inaugurated in 1925. That was the second mosque built in Germany – the first was in a WWI POW camp in Wünsdorf, where Muslim prisoners of war from Russia – Tatars and Caucasians – and the British and French colonies were interned. The German authorities attempted to radicalize and instrumentalize them, and recruit them to fight on the German side. Going to war for the Germans was a chance to get to freedom from the prison camp, and also another chance to die for no good reason. Only one in seven POWs chose this path, much less than the German authorities had hoped.
The comic book project is still in the draft/script stage so it will be a while before I can show something more concrete (if ever …). It could be a piggy comic, like Sweet Peas, where the characters as piggies symbolize the conflicting experience between the past (lost, rejected) Muslim heritage, and their present/future new and reconstructed sense of belonging.
COMICINVASIONBERLIN 2017
In the weekend I was at Comicinvasion Berlin, yay!
It was a bit of a disaster, because my brand spanking new zines that I had planned to have at the festival were stuck in the parcel center with a “sorting error” for almost a week (today it finally says the delivery is underway ;___;).
So I only had old stuff, but there were enough people who didn’t know it or didn’t have all of my books yet so it was okay I guess.
Of course there were so many other amazing comics at the festival, and my best new discoveries were Grey Area: From the City to the Sea by Tim Bird, a quietly poetic comic where the artist travels from London to the North Sea and reflects on the landscapes, and Drawing the XXth Century by Lithuanian and Belarusian artists Lina Itagaki, Miglė Pužaitė, Viktorija Ežiukas and Viktoryia Andrukovič, with stories told by the artists’ parents and grandparents and documented as comics. To my shame I couldn’t buy a copy of the latter, because the story The White Pig by Lina Itagaki was so sad that I would just have cried every time I glanced at the book. V;(oo);V
Somehow I didn’t take photos of anything, except …
1. This absolutely deliriously hypnotic doggie, who was tabling with the art suppliers Malstoff, and got lots and lots of cuddles from everyone, very much including myself:
2. My calling cards that I painted by hand on the spot (maybe I should print proper ones):
(Oops, forgot to colour one)
The next festival I’m going to is Stockholm International Comics Festival! The main event is May 20th-21st, and I will be part of an amazing group exhibition that opens on May 19th and finishes on the 25th!
