Embarking on a piggy project
I’m making a little piggy book for the Swedish publisher Ordbilder. They called for pitches last summer, and now I found out that from all the book proposals they got, they chose mine. It will be published next year in time for the book fair in Gothenburg.
This is one of the sample pages I submitted (the only one without spoilers):
The book doesn’t have a proper title yet. The English working title was Sweet Peas, but it doesn’t really work in Swedish, and I hate puns anyway. V^(oo)^V
The story is set in the future, somewhere in what used to be Russia, after a great war that left everything poisoned. A small group of surviving piggies has built an Anarchist commune, growing food and recycling the remains of civilization, and we follow one day in the life of Organizational Secretary Andrei Lesnikov.
In the proposal I summarized it as “Hansu no kikan meets Yokohama kaidashi kikou, with an extra large serving of death-angst”, and thought that maybe it sounded a bit too whacked. But Ordbilder is using that exact phrase in their first promo for the book. Heh.
And now I actually have to draw it … V`(oo)´;V
It will be awesomepants to work in colour and especially to draw piggies.
No Zinefest for me …
This weekend it’s Zinefest, but I’m too §$%&ing ill … Today I had to go out a bit, and on the bus home I got one of those conditions when slime drips down your throat, and it makes your eyes water like crazy, but if you cough or breathe too hard you’re going to puke! Yay!
In fact I was able to breathe very flatly and with great focus and keep swallowing desperately for about 10 minutes until the danger was over. But I’m in no state for selling zines …
Sketchdump!
Recently I finished this sketchbook, with its slightly questionable cover:
Here are some previously unpublished sketches from that book! V^(oo)^V
Helsinki Comics Festival piggy drawings
The highlight of the festival was probably when a slightly inebriated Russian showed up, distraught that he had lost his tour bus and had to figure out how to get home to Vyborg somehow, in this hostile city where nobody spoke Russian and police officers gave him the finger when he tried to ask them for help. Luckily I actually did speak Russian, so I showed him the way to the central train station, from where he was hopefully able to catch a taxi to the port. :-/
On Saturday I sold 34 piggy postcards and some books and zines, and I painted some watercolour piggies (and some kind of disproportional/non-euclidic shiba):
On Sunday my comics business was totally dead, so I painted “desolate piggies in melancholy landscapes”, as Ainur dubbed them:
