Dertil kommer selvfølgelig alle de sædvanlige anbefalinger af tegneserier fra året sder gik, diskuteret i studiet og suppleret af en række internationale gæster: Mat Boyle, Xavier Guilbert, Teddy Kristiansen, Jesper Tae Jensen, Erik Petri og Sandra Sundquist. Godt nytår!!

Lyt her og læs (snart!) mere på Nummer9.

Med tredje og sidste bind i sit værk om dronning Caroline Mathilde, Struensee, kong Christian VII og den danske revolution, I morgen bliver bedre, synes Karoline Stjernfelt momentant at ophæve tyngdekraften i dansk tegneserie.

Hun har med den skabt en litterært ambitiøst, original fortolkning af et skelsættende stykke danmarkshistorie i en enormt arbejdskrævende form, tegneserien: knap 700 sider, udgivet i albumformat i stil med de store fransk-belgiske klassikere, fra før verden gik af lave. En højst usædvanlig bedrift, uomgængelig inden for dansk tegneserie, men også en, der tydeligvis er opnået under barske kompromiser.

Læs hele herligheden her!

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.

I morgendagens bogtillæg til Information, og allerede nu på nettet, kan man læse min anmeldelse af andet bind af Karoline Stjernfelts stort anlagte trilogi om Christian VII, Caroline Mathilde og Struensee, I morgen bliver bedre. Den markerer på alle områder en modning i fh.t. til det allerede imponerende bind 1. Bevares, der er stadig problemer, men det er vildt at se en talentfuld skaber udvikle sig så meget.

Central er skildringen af Dronningens og Livlægens forhold, samt sidstnævntes til Kongen. Der er arbejdet rigtig meget med karaktererne og det gør læseoplevelsen desto rigere, samtidig med det sætter scenen for den udfordring bind tre helt sikkert vil være, når den engang udkommer. Hermed et uddrag af min anmeldelse:

Stjernfelt levendegør et blomstrende forhold, hvor den gensidige tiltrækning bunder i deres fælles uvilje mod at indordne sig og parallelle, men dybest set vidt forskellige ønsker om noget større. Stjernfelt tror ikke på politisk kalkulation som motiv for hverken den ene eller den anden, men benægter samtidig ikke den afrodisiske kraft, magten har.

Det er velgørende at se, hvorledes hun lægger afstand til sit klare forbillede, nyligt afdøde Per Olov Enquists afholdte roman Livlægens besøg (1999). Hvor tiltrækningen, der både var mere intellektuel og mere erotisk : og ikke så lidt litterært kunstlet : forekommer den hos Stjernfelt naturligere: Vi oplever Caroline Mathildes ungdomsforelskelse i en moden mand, der bekræfter hendes oprør, bemyndiger hende og i øvrigt ser godt ud i et par blomstrede bukser. Samtidig er Stjernfelts kropspositive skildring af den lavstammede og buttede dronning tilpas sensuel, sårbar og vital, til at ligningen går op.

Læs her, mod betaling.

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.