Døden (‘Death’)
by Halfdan Pisket
Fahrenheit
Pisket established himself emphatically with his great Dansker trilogy (2014:16), but he also created a tough challenge for himself. It was the vigorous and harrowing story of his Turkish-Armenian immigrant father’s life between countries, cultures and criminal justice systems. A powerful, personal story of the kind that is often hard to match a second time, as we have seen with Pisket’s role models, Art Spiegelman and David B. His new book Døden, however, is a worthy follow-up—a kind of fictional reconfiguration of the same thematic field. It is the portrait of a young man’s inexorable dance with death, as the loyal companion of a dying friend in the cancer ward, as an ex-criminal haunted by his past and as an orphan of immigrants. Similar to the trilogy, it merges social realism with poetic fabulism and terse lyrical prose with inky, expressive drawing. It feels close to life as lived, while reaching for an epic register without feeling forced.

My review of Døden in the Danish newspaper Information.

I morgen bliver bedre 2: Dronningen (‘Tomorrow will be brighter 2: The Queen’)
by Karoline Stjernfelt
Cobolt
This is the greatly anticipated second volume of Stjernfelt’s trilogy on the mad Danish king Christian VII (reg. 1766:1808), his English queen Caroline Mathilde, his personal doctor Johan Friedrich Struensee and the so-called and very short-lived Danish Revolution of 1771:72. The first book, published in 2015, set the scene by bringing together the three central characters in pre-revolutionary Copenhagen. It was an enormously confident debut for Stjernfelt, and even something of a commercial success. This second volume ups the ante in every way, concentrating on the the famous romantic relationship between Caroline Mathilde and Struensee and how it empowered the young queen personally to assert herself at a court that regarded her as nothing but a means to an end. Stjernfelt’s interpretation of this historical episode is both eloquent and elegant, an affecting study of youthful love and rebellion set against the backdrop of Enlightenment idealism. It culminates in the radical reforms—notably the most wide-ranging freedom of expression laws in history—that Struensee instates once he has gained the trust of the king through a combination of guile and genuine sympathy. This is a big project and the third and final volume, which will detail the political fallout and its tragic personal consequences, will evidently not see the light of day for another few years at best, but considering where we are, it is hard to see how it would not be worth the wait.

My review of I morgen bliver bedre 2 in the Danish newspaper Information.

#linejensenillu
by Line Jensen
Instagram
Line Jensen has had a great year. When the pandemic hit in March, she was primed for it: Having chronicled for several years her daily life with two kids and a touring musician husband on Instagram, she was perfectly positioned to describe the unsettlement and anxiety brought on by the pandemic. She described lockdown with humour, warmth and precision, reminding her tens of thousands of followers that we were all in similar boats. She tends in her work to gloss over the darker or more troubling aspects of life, but her sense of everyday family dynamics is spot on and her bendy, cheeky drawings often laugh-out-loud funny. She supplemented this effort with a children’s book on Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, a national treasure, and opened an honest-to-god bricks-and-mortar shop selling her artwork and merchandise in defiance of the economic slowdown. At the end of the year, however, it is her account of a widely-shared ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances that remains with us.

Noget frygteligt er altid lige ved at ske (“Something awful is always just about to happen”)
by Lars Kramhøft
Fahrenheit
Lars Kramhøft is among the most ambitious younger Danish cartoonists working today. While he already has several books under his belt, this one felt like a bona fide arrival. The book is a semi-autobiographical account of a young man’s first year in the cartooning programme of the Viborg Animation Workshop, negotiating his artistic dreams with sometimes crippling social anxiety. It is also a thoughtful dissection of masculine identity in a society with rapidly shifting attitudes to gender. The protagonist’s flirtation with incel culture is ultimately too superficial truly to become interesting, but it ties in very smoothly with Kramhøft’s more organic treatment of his character’s suicidal tendencies, explored in recognition of the rising suicide rate among young men in Westen countries today. Kramhøft exhibits a terse grasp on structure and a works in clear rendering style that may owe a lot to Kevin Huizenga but works seamlessly. Noget frygteligt er altid lige ved at ske was awarded the Ping Award for Best Danish Comic of the year.

My review of Noget frygteligt er altid lige ved at ske in the Danish newspaper Information.

Honorable Mention:

Grøde (“Fecundity”)
by Signe Parkins
Uro
Much to my shame, I missed this milestone work by one of Denmark’s most distinctive and fascinating cartoonists when I wrote last year’s roundup. It came out late in the year however, so I don’t feel too bad about including it here. Grøde is a chunky book of loosely connected drawings—and no words, so do try and get hold of it—that add up to a vague if unmistakeable narrative of inner conflict and despair. The same character, a woman with long, bendy limbs and sagging breasts—Parkins’ signature alter ego—populates the pages in multiples, forming constellations of organic shapes and architectural structures. Themes of sex and motherhood are central in this tour de force of sequential drawing—a difficult, depressed book, but also one of unflinching resolve.

But that’s less relevant — what’s important is that this is a distinct and compelling work of memoir, empathy and history, told in comics form. I absolutely encourage you to seek it out if you read Danish or French, and if not then pester your favourite comics publisher to put it out in a language you can read. Check out my column here.

Hvad føler du lige nu? (‘What are you feeling right now?’)
by Philip Ytournel
Aben maler
Ytournel is the brightest and probably funniest newspaper cartoonist in Denmark. At their best, his strips break the old, long-established boundaries in terms of format, medium and — most importantly — humour, demonstrating that editorial cartooning can be different and creative, in spite of prescriptive tradition. And he is just plain funny, blending political with keenly observed, social satire. He has an eye for the absurdity and vanity in the banal details of diction and posture that other cartoonists either don’t notice or find too shallow to mine for commentary. This book collects his best work from more than a decade’s worth of work at the daily newspaper Politiken, including his brilliant 2013 comics inset on Søren Kierkegaard, written and drawn on the occasion of the world-famous Danish philosopher’s bicentenary. In it, he not only provides an ‘Existentialism for Beginners-type intro, but also comments hilariously on recent reception history and attendant controversy, and most poignantly situates Kierkegaard’s relevance to the average life of an average person wanting to be a football coach.

Dansker (‘Dane’)
by Halfdan Pisket
Fahrenheit
The third and final volume in Pisket’s poetic and hard-hitting biography of his Armenian-Turkish immigrant father focuses on his slow and always imperfect settlement, not only in Danish society but into his role as father. Here are links to my reviews on this site of the first volume and . Through his David B-esque blank writing and suggestive, symbolist chiaroscuro, Pisket achieves a remarkable feat of hermeneutic empathy in portraying his own young self externally — through the eyes of his traumatised, criminal and in many ways irresponsible father. We come to understand, even sympathise with him, and we sense that the cartoonist himself does too, through the act of writing and drawing it out. While this means that the more ambiguous feelings expressed through his portrayal in the more powerful earlier volumes are somewhat neglected, it is beautifully moving.

Here are my picks for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, 2014, and 2015.

Fra Lars Hornemans bidrag til Uledsaget

Den bløde mand, Laursen, inkarnerer en dansk kultur, hvor tilliden til medmennesket er høj og korruption en sjældenhed. Hans manglende evne til at sige fra udstiller systemets sårbarhed overfor pragmatisk udnyttelse, mens hans patetisk morsomt skildrede moralske kvababbelser antyder styrken i det anstændighedens imperativ, han trods alt lever under. Krarups tegninger er en anelse skematiske og bliver over så mange sider monotone, men at han forstår nuancens kunst ses i bogens sidste billede af Laursen.

Hr. Gris (‘Mr. Pig’)
by Peter Kielland
Aben Maler

With Hr. Gris, Peter Kielland, one of the most distinctive voices in Nordic comics, signs his most complex and difficult work, but also one of his funniest. Hr. Gris is a doomed everyman of the kind that Kielland invariably places at the centre of his modern fairly tales. The protagonist is split between a world of grim fantasy ruled by a one-eyed demiurge, and a slow, quotidian death in the gutters of a big city and in its manicured suburban plots. Hellfire separates these planes of existence, but they are inextricably intertwined, revealed to each other in comics pages that the protagonist comes across. The book is essentially a series of loosely, but ominously connected short stories that unite to form an ambitious and exhilarating, but at times also frustratingly impenetrable metaphysics of life, full of dark humour and exquisitely timed sequences of absurd slapstick. A personal vision expertly fashioned in the frivolous language of the comics of old.

Kakerlak (‘Cockroach’)
by Halfdan Pisket
Fahrenheit

The second part of Pisket’s brutally poetic retelling of his Armenian/Turkish immigrant father’s life concentrates on his arrival and early life in Denmark as an immigrant haunted by a violent past, not least the torture he was subjected to as a deserter from the Turkish army. It is a life on the edge that poisons every relationship he enters into, particularly when it comes to the women with whom he has children. Epileptic seizures are medicated with marijuana, while his fears and anxieties are marinated in alcohol; a life of sordid and increasingly desperate crime awaits. Kakerlak is a powerful account of the immigrant experience, of its psychology and pathology, charted in a suggestively oneiric chiaroscuro by a rapidly-developing artist.

I morgen bliver bedre 1: Kongen (‘Tomorrow will be better’ vol. 1: ‘The King’)
by Karoline Stjernfelt
Cobolt

This piece of historical fiction mines the same powerfully romantic material as Nikolaj Arcel’s Academy Award-nominated 2012 banality A Royal Affair, but takes a more down-to-earth approach to the story of the mad Danish king Christian VII, his English bride Caroline Mathilde, and her lover, physician to the king and would-be political player Johan Friedrich Struensee. In this, the first volume of a planned trilogy, the focus is on the young queen and her efforts to maintain a meaningful life in what is only a marriage by name, and on the young, intelligent, but also unstable and dangerously fragile king, who sees his efforts at happiness frustrated by the duties of his office and the machinations of the politicians who actually run the country. Struensee is introduced, but how his brief and scandalous rise to the top will be handled is a matter for the next volumes. Clocking in at over 150 pages and rendered in what might be described as a youthful, slightly shojo-inflected interpolation of the illustrative classicism of French veteran André Juillard, this is an astoundingly assured debut by the 22-year old author.

From Halfdan Pisket's Desertør

Desertør (‘Deserter’)
by Halfdan Pisket
Forlaget Fahrenheit

Among the most promising Danish comics debuts in a decade, this is the first volume of a trilogy telling the story of the cartoonist’s father. His youth in the borderlands between Armenia and Turkey is described with the kind of vividness that comes not only of a man with a good memory, but also of an attentive storyteller with a great sense of telling detail. Half-Turkish, half Armenian, the protagonist embodies the uncertain, untethered state of his hometown, circled as it is by Turkish soldiers guarding the peace, and haunted as it is by the bones of the Armenian genocide, still lining the roads. Central to the story is Pisket’s father’s short stint in the Turkish army, from which he deserts with fatal consequences. His motivation is partly political, but runs deeper, and Pisket is to be commended for trying to probe further, examining the more troubling aspects of his father’s personality and the sense of betrayal he clearly carries around.

Pisket’s approach is poetic, almost dreamlike—far from traditional realism, but clearly rooted in lived reality. His digitally executed line work, with its dramatically spotted blacks, is reminiscent of Didier Comès’ dreamy comics symbolism, while his use of visual metaphor—the Turkish solders all wear threatening, anonymising white burlap hoods, for instance—takes a page out of David B’s playbook. Pisket is possessed of a real talent for narrative drawing, however, composing pages that combine the visceral with the mysterious, and his prose is at times exquisitely evocative. While Pisket still struggles somewhat with the clarity of his storytelling, he is clearly a remarkable new voice in comics. The second volume, Kakerlak (‘Cockroach’), which describes Pisket’s father’s arrival as an immigrant in Denmark, will be published imminently. Read an eleven-page preview is available on issuu here and check out this interview with Pisket at Opaque Journal.

Fimbulvinter (‘Fimbulwinter’)
by Søren Glosimodt Mosdal
Aben maler

Based on the Norse sagas, this is a retelling the colonisation of Greenland by the Icelander Erik the Red and his relationship with his son, Leif the Lucky, the Christian convert who would subsequently ‘discover’ America. It is a portrait of a man who loses his grip in conflict with his son and becomes a symbol of the collapse of an old order in the face of a new one. Historic facts are interwoven with divine visions in an effort to evoke the spiritual milieu of the time, while the author’s oneiric inference in several impressively rendered sequences contributes additionally to what is essentially a darkly lyrical meditation on the thin line between power and marginalisation. Mosdal has always been interested in the outsider, or in people who consider themselves as such—see for example the compilation of his early stories in Gash (Slab-O-Concrete 2001) or his and Jacob Ørsted’s recent, hilarious generational satire Rockworld (Fahrenheit 2013; Hoochie Coochie, 2014).

His portrait of the marginalised patriarch Erik is by far his most ambitious work to date. It is, in part, also a failure: it was originally planned as a trilogy, which would also have covered in more depth Eric and the young Leif’s journey to Greenland, as well as the latter’s American adventure. Mosdal cut this sprawling project back to a single, fat volume, which makes for a confusing, unresolved read in places, exacerbating the difficulties with plotting and panel-to-panel continuity that characterises all his work. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully cartooned, haunting piece of work well worth the effort. Also available in French from Casterman. And here’s Mosdal’s tumblr.

Et knald til (‘One More Bang’)
by Rikke Villadsen
Aben maler

In this, her second book-length work, Villadsen continues the examination of male archetypes and genre conventions started in 2011’s Ind fra havet. Her framework here is the western, with most of her characters plucked from Sergio Leone’s casting catalogue. However, this is a kind of psycho-sexual genre-bender, with two women—a whore and a young girl with transgender aspirations—at its centre. The various cowboys surrounding them strut around with their phallic implements, and one of them even gets to penetrate the whore with a fly on his member—something which Villadsen depicts from the inside!

Sounds gross, perhaps, but it’s actually rather hysterical, for Villadsen is a funny cartoonist, tempering her psychoanalytic insights with freewheeeling humour and inventive visuals. The dialogue is partly in Danish, partly in English, but it really is not all that important to know both languages to enjoy the book, which works in large part because of its expressive, painterly artwork. Villadsen, who relied heavily on the example of Anke Feuchtenberger in Ind fra havet, has matured considerably and has adapted her still-dominant inspiration to a sensibility that is actually quite different from that of the German master cartoonist. Rendered in ink wash with corrections and reinforcements left visible to the reader, this is lively, process-oriented storytelling brimming with ambition, if also rather heavy-handed in passages. A disillusioned statement on the biological underpinnings of gender that feels like a lively romp until it hits home. Here is Rikke’s tumblr.

Det Sarahkastiske hjørne (‘The Sarahcastic Nook’)
by Sarah Glerup
Self-published webcomic

This online diary consisting of comics as well as text pieces is a deceptively powerful, honest day-by-day account of the life of a self-described “Lesbian, radical leftist, big sister-humanist nerd with muscular dystrophy”. Her condition makes Glerup’s point of view an unusual one, and one senses it informs her dry humour, but it is really just gravy in a strip which is plain funny, and not a little insightful. Glerup’s honesty is of the raw variety, but never becomes overbearing. She brings to material that in other hands might have been rather dour (such as being fitted with a respirator) a refreshingly cheeky, kinky gleam in the eye. The art is digitally wrought using vectors and is decidedly unlovely, reminding the reader of the motoric constrictions of the artist. A rather touching, paradoxical index of the artist’s hand. Its garish colouring and angular contouring also serve the material well—brutal and quite beautiful. [Sample strips above, prefaced on the Glerup’s website with the heading “People tend to think that belonging to two minorities is hard. But in many ways being a cripple prepared me for a life being queer (and vice versa)…”]

Here are my picks for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.