For the past three weeks, the Danish comics site has been remembering comics legend Jean Giraud/Moebius’ passing with articles, essays, reminiscences from a number of Danish creators, and — most interesting to a non-Danish reading audience: drawn homages. Go here for a panoply of drawings on “The Theme” by Denmark’s finest.
Above is Jan Solheim, below Christian Højgaard reinterprets the last page of The Hermetic Garage.
Kolor Klimax cover illo by Aapo Rapi
Below you will find links to hi-res images from the book, ready for publication, as well as other resources that might be helpful. Please let us know if we can help you with anything else. And enjoy the book!
By Steffen Rayburn Maarup
As mentioned in this space once or twice, Kolor Klimax — Nordic Comics Now, edited by this site’s owner Matthias Wivel, is now available in bookstores across North America, and thus the rest of the world. To mark the official release, I decided to ask him a few questions on the book, the project and the future.
Why a Nordic comics anthology? Why the US? And why Fantagraphics?
The idea came from the Finnish Comics Society. They’ve been running an international initiative called Nordicomics — which includes exhibitions and workshops — for a number of years now, and figured that publishing an anthology series in English would help their mission to promote Nordic comics internationally. The idea is that this is the first in a series of books with rotating editors, under the general helmsmanship of Kalle Hakkola of FCS, who is responsible for Nordicomics. The second book is already being planned and will be totally different from Kolor Klimax in concept as well as content. As I understand it, the idea is that every book will be a stand-alone work.
As for Fantagraphics, I basically bit the idea from you. As I’m sure it did for your Danish anthology From Wonderland with Love, it just seemed the obvious choice — besides having been one of the best American comics publishers for decades, they’re consistently the most interested in supporting grass roots projects such as this one, as long as the quality is there. And co-publisher Kim Thompson is half Danish and knows about and is interested in Nordic comics already.
Kolor Klimax — Nordic Comics Now, the big fat anthology of contemporary Nordic comics that I’ve edited for the Finnish comics initiative Nordicomics is now available for order from its publisher Fantagraphics Books, as well as on bookshelves all over America and worldwide (theoretically, at least).
Above is the publisher’s promotional video. See photos from and of it here, and check out its Facebook page here.
The week in review
The passing of Jean Giraud is the passing of one of the great cartoonists and visual artists of his generation. It had become easy to take the enormously productive artist for granted, even to bore of him, what with him performing well below his own best a lot of the time in the last couple of decades, but it should not be forgotten that this was somebody who generously gave of his vision of the world, making it his through his drawing and storytelling, and ever-so-subtly affecting our common visual imaginary. His was a quiet ubiquity of a kind that only few artists could ever hope to reach. He shall be missed.
The snap above was taken at the Angoulême train station on the Sunday of the festival in 2006, reading the already seminal Kramers Ergot 4. F-R-E-S-H.
Here are some Giraud/Moebius links:
Earlier today I posted an appreciation of the late Moebius’ last great work, Le Chasseur déprime, over at Hooded Utilitarian. Reading that book in the light of his illness and death suddenly seemed to make a lot of sense. It is among his most profound, questioning works — a fitting artistic testament from somebody who changed our way of seeing. Go check it out.
Kramers Four
Our 2003 take on the seminal comics anthology, written as it was happening!
From Beatty's overture
It was a surprise when Sammy Harkham and Picture Box publisher Dan Nadel announced their plans for Kramers Ergot 8 about a year ago. Some of us had assumed that the monumental Kramers Ergot 7 had been the decadent word in what has been by far the most groundbreaking comics anthology of the new century.
Despite good intentions and hard work, Kramers Ergot 7 was a disappointment, but on the other hand it was a book with everything to lose and little to gain, and at any rate it marked a fitting finale to a great run.
As an aesthetic project, Kramers Ergot has succeeded beyond the wildest expectations, and especially the breakthrough Kramers Ergot 4 remains the high point of helmsman Sammy Harkham’s anthology series.
