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I’m currently editing a new comics project. The project is called DYSTOPIA and it’s a series of comic short stories on the theme of dystopia, as the name suggests. That is dystopia in a broad sense. We want the title to be open for a wide variety of genres and subjects, like science fiction, cyberpunk, horror and current political subjects.

It will be a series of 32-page books in 140×182mm format. Optional color or black & white. Each book will be one story (24-26 pgs) or it will be done as a split (flip book) between two artists if the stories are shorter. They will be made in two editions (Swedish and English) because one is not enough.

Contributors will be a mix of new and established talent, old classics and new stories. The first book was a split with Danijel Zezelj and Carol Swain and other interesting artists have shown interest as well, so artists who decide to join will be in good company.

More info at the Wormgod website. 

Dystopia is a cooperation between Wormgod (which is me and Susanne Johansson, both former editors of C’est Bon Anthology) and the Swedish Comics Association. For me, this is part of an ongoing effort to internationalise the comics scene and also to publish comics with something to say.

Here are the covers for the first split:

Contact me with any questions at mattias @ elftorp . com (delete the empty spaces).

A while ago, my identity was stolen. Luckily, I had already made a copy of it so I could afford to lose it. It’s good to make copies of stuff, because when someone steals a copy, the original owner doesn’t actually lose anything.

It happened like this: A while ago in my apartment builduing, they moved the mailboxes downstairas. Which is a very good thing, because it’s a lot easier on the mailmen. Problem is that the kind of boxes they got in our house are very easy to get into without a key. If you are a person with very small hands, say a gnome or similar, you have no problem breaking into the boxes to steal people’s mail. And that’s obviously what happened to me.

There are several lessons to be learned here:

-It’s good to move mailboxes downstairs, but they should be safe.
-It’s good to copy things, because copies aren’t lost when stolen.
-Gnomes are not to be trusted.

New shoes here I come!

What was I going to write here?

Oh well…

Time for a break, I think.

I’m working a bit behind the scenes with a friend of mine on her book, Sayonara September, which will be out this September from Kartago Förlag.

Detail from an unfinished piece I'm doing for the Sayonara September gallery...

I already knew I liked her stuff, but working this close with someone else’s material gives you a new appreciation for it. It’s really an interesting experience. Also, after having read the first 100 or so pages of the book, I really look forward to having the finished book in my hands and getting to read it all at once (which will have to wait though, since there are three books planned before it’s all done. -Which is another reason why I like it. There are very few comics creators working in sweden right now who take their time to tell their stories like this. Who let the details drag out for a long time (counted in pages), because they’ve realised that there’s a lot to be said for details, and also let the overall story take its time to reach its conclusion. There are also (still) very few artists working in sweden right now who put this much effort into refining their art. But there are some, and I’m hoping there will be more of that in the coming years.

At this year’s SPX in Stockholm (hosted by Serieteket), there were some books that I especially looked forward to reading when I got home. One was Niklas Asker’s Second Thoughts, recently released from Top Shelf Comix, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not a very long story, but there’s a great sensitivity in it, and attention to the little things. And I really like the art. I already look forward to Niklas’ next book, so hopefully he’ll get the time to do it soon…

There was also a book by Natalia Batista, called A Song for Elise, which I haven’t read yet, but it looks interesting. First swedish Yaoi I’ve seen and I’m quite intrigued. I just need a bit more time to read stuff.

Speaking of reading… Pretty soon I expect I’ll get to see the new Oblivion High too, created by rama, creator of Vesi Oli Mustaa. The problem is that all her books so far are in finnish, which I don’t understand much of, so I can’t read them. Seems like finnish publishers are more willing to look at new interesting stuff than the swedish ones. Big surprise.

Other than the ones I’ve mentioned, most of what I got at the SPX was not swedish books. There’s still so much, more interesting, stuff that are published elsewhere that I can’t really be bothered by most of the swedish stuff. Which is too bad, of course, but it’s just the way things are, at least for now. The swedish comics climate has long been constituted (maybe I should say dominated, because there are of course some, more peripheral, exceptions) by a very small community that has for a long time been quite uninterested in looking past the national borders. Consequently, the most interesting work right now seems to be created by artists who have looked to the outside for inspiration, be it Manga or western comics…

I should mention, I guess, that this thing about not looking outside of the national borders for inspiration is a problem that has as much to do with swedish society in general as it has with the swedish comics culture. Självgodhet is the swedish word that comes to mind.

By the way, I’m starting to suspect that Piracy is Liberation will be at least 20 books, and not 19 as I used to think until I started planning for book 007…

And, last but not least, I should mention that Suss and I have started to plan the first graphic novel to come out of the Wormgod project. It’s a horror story, naturally. More on that later…

So. Once again.

This is the end of the old.

[Insert mental image here.]

I intend to use this blog to share inspiration.

I will talk about things that inspire me (media/culture/reality) and also talk about things I’m working on.
Mainly my cyberpunk postapocalyse comics project, Piracy is Liberation.

Piracy is Liberation is political theory, filtered through autobiography, masked as fiction
in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse.

This is me:
www.elftorp.com
www.elftorp.com/freeinformation
www.elftorp.com/infotrip (currently under reconstruction)
www.myspace.com/elftorp

and I’m currently listening to

Ministry – The Great Satan