These photos provide at panorama of the guests at last night’s reception, pretty much a who’s who of a certain set of generations in Danish comics. Many of the creators, editors, publishers, and retailers of the seventies and eighties, contemporaries of Hjorth-Jørgensen, showed up to celebrate. It was great to see them all. A the mic, Iben Overgaard, director of the Storm P. Museum, initiated the proceedings, and she was followed by Thomas Thorhauge, chairman of the Danish Comics Council, and Hjorth-Jørgensen himself, both of whose speeches are excerpted in the videos below.

And finally, here are videos of Thorhauge and Hjorth-Jørgensen speaking at the reception:

The director Mads Damsbo is really dedicated to showcasing the intersection between popular culture and high art and is planning to continue to do so in the coming years with new iterations of the Cool Comics idea. Color me excited that we have a gallery that devotes its energy simultaneously to such forms as comics, animation and digital media and to once popular, now enshrined high art such as the drawings of François Boucher — the object of a world class selection of drawings displayed beautifully at Gammel Holtegaard just prior to Cool Comics.

Click on over to the Bunker’s photo page to experience our virtual walk-through of the exhibition courtesy of our ailing Canon Ixus camera. Enjoy, and keep an eye on future shows at Gammel Holtegaard!

Robert Hughes 1938–2012

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!

Resources
Selection of hi-res images from Kolor Klimax.

Johan F. Krarup, Henrik Andreasen and Marianne Eskebæk Larsen at the release party.

Same day saw a fine review by Bart Beaty, published at Comics Reporter. I was happy to see that he noticed not only some of the consolidated talents, but some relatively new ones, Johan F. Krarup and Mikkel Damsbo/Gitte Broeng, who I also think contributed really outstanding pieces to the book. Here’s a pull quote from Bart:

“Ultimately, there is no way not to recommend Kolor Klimax. It showcases a wide range of extremely talented cartoonists, and will open your eyes to a whole world of comics that get far too little attention. Something to anticipate for Spring.”

Dues paid: top photo by Mark Borello, bottom one by Frederik Høyer-Christensen.

I’ve posted a small selection of images over at Nummer9. Peep them.

At the the heart of the conflict is the announcement of redundancies made by the direction in December, a decision the employees don’t believe is justified by the troubled financial situation the publisher finds itself in, in part due to the collapse of their distributor Le Comptoir des indépendants last fall, but primarily due to reduced sales in general. They have been insisting that there are other means of solving its current solvency issues, including reducing its enormously costly back catalogue storage (apparently, l’Association has never held a sale or eliminated inventory). They describe the decision to fire a number of employees as a “philosophical” one, meant to strengthen the publisher’s new line of radical but reduced output and express dissatisfaction with this decision having been made over their heads and without consulting the membership (remember, l’Association is not registered as a traditional business, but rather as an organisation).

Responding to this press release and to the events of the last month and a half in general, l’Association’s unofficial director and editorial and ideological centre, Jean-Christophe Menu has released a long letter, sharing his point of view on the affair. I won’t go into detail, but merely note the main points here:

There’s much more, including many details of the individual meetings held over the past month, but little in terms of what Menu’s position is going in to the general assembly on 5 March. I guess we shall just have to see, and hope for as positive an outcome as possible.

Image of the Association booth at the Angoulême festival with the sign saying “Employees on strike”.

Check my full coverage of the festival over at The Comics Journal, and if you read Danish be sure to stop by Nummer9’s here.

Chers tous, auteurs, adhérents, libraires, éditeurs, journalistes, amis,

Les salariés de L’Association (Éric Bricka, Carmela Chergui, Marie Chesnais, Fanny Dalle-Rive, Nicolas Leroy, Philippe Reveau, Frédéric Van Linden)

Basically it states that, at that point, the staff still hadn’t been given any satisfying reasons for why 3-4 of them would be made redundant from next month. They insist that there are other solutions to the financial problems the publisher is experiencing and demand that the organisation’s constitution be followed and a general assembly be called for these to be reviewed.

According to a press release sent out yesterday, publisher Patricia Perdrizet and editor-in-chief Jean-Christophe Menu have agreed to hold a general assembly very soon. They maintain that a solution will be found to keep the doors open and the printing presses running.

So it sounds like the people involved are finally talking and that steps are being taken to resolve the situation. It’s difficult, however, to shake the sense that things have been going seriously awry there for quite a while. The strike press release maintains that the financial troubles go back at least 2-3 years and that some of the staff have tried to raise the issue with the direction earlier. While it is impossible for an outsider to say, it seems likely that the lack of communication implied by the staff might be related to Menu working on his Ph. D. thesis, which he defended at the Sorbonne some two weeks ago.

Of course, a major problem has been the collapse, late last year, of Le Comptoir des indépendants, the joint distribution agency run by a number of small publishers. Many of their accounts have been taken over by the generalist Belles Lettres Diffusion, with whom not everyone is apparently satisfied, and even if the transition either to them or to other distributors ends up proving fairly seamless, it has surely resulted in cash flow problems for many of the involved parties.

The tension caused by this incident and general relations with l’Association, the biggest participant in Le Comptoir, seems apparent in the online petition made by a number of cartoonists and publishers, many of whom have worked for and with l’Association, and three of which (David B., Killoffer, Trondheim) are founders and former partners. It seeks support for the striking staff, expressing hopes that the problems will be solved and that l’Association will continue operation. It is hard not to sense in the wording a dissatisfaction with how the publisher has conducted business over the last few years.

Not being familiar with any of the details, I should stress that this is more or less all speculation on my part, and I don’t feel qualified to express an opinion on these developments. I will join both the staff, the petitioners and Menu/Pedrizet in their differently worded but basically congruous wishes that l’Assocation will stay with us for many years to come.

PS — Just a warning: The Wall Street Journal seems to have picked up on these events, or something like them, by way of their Hungarian phrasebook. Billed as a story about the OuBaPo — an experimental comics grouping published by, and involving members of, but otherwise independent of l’Association — it mixes in undigested, if not entirely unmoored bits of information clearly pertaining to that publisher itself rather than the OuBaPo, and ends up positing the latter as the locus of problems with which it has at best been peripherally involved. A bizarre example of a journalist asking all the right people what seems to have been more or less the right questions, but still getting almost everything wrong.

It was a lively and well-attended event, despite the regrettable last-minute cancellation by the Social Democrat member of parliament Karen Hækkerup, who is the instigator of the proposal to ban drawn child pornography. The Council invited a number of other politicians who have supported the proposal, but without luck. The debate was streamed live on the internet and is archived in its entirety here.

Several photographers were there, including my buddy Frederik Høyer-Christensen, who took the above photo of literary critic Klaus Rothstein and commentator/lawyer Jacob Mchangama and has more in his Flickr- and Facebook sets. More images, from photographer Niels Larsen and cartoonists Erik Petri and Annette Carlsen can be seen at the Danish Comics Council website.

The conference tied in with that weekend’s International comics festival, Komiks.dk, and was organized jointly by the Institute of Art and Cultural Studies, the Danish Comics Council and the festival. I very much enjoyed being part of the conference committee, which besides myself consisted of Rikke Platz Cortsen, Andreas Gregersen, Liva Skogeman, Christian Jess Rasmussen and Carsten Fogh Nielsen. Credit is especially due to Rikke, Ph.D-student at the Institute, who in addition to helming the conference taught a course on comics in the spring semester and saw her students through their exams at the festival itself, in front of a broad audience. Without her, none of this would have happened. Also, thanks to everyone else involved and everyone who turned up. It was nice meeting you all, and a great day!

We now have some pictures up over at the Danish Comics Council website — here are the photos taken on the day by Henrik Conradsen, from which the above image of Gravett and Ware is culled, and here are cartoonist Erik Petris live sketches.