Nikoline Werdelin – the metabunker

Boom PING PING

Matthias Wivel — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:34:56 +0000

Nikoline Werdelin for the win!

It’s been a week and half since the big show, but I still think this year’s Ping awards deserve a few words for what little international audience this site still has after months of hibernation.

The Ping awards is an annual set of awards given to comics in Denmark in the manner of the Angoulême Fauves or the American Eisners. Founded by the Danish Comics Council, the awards are a revivification of a differently conceived, hall of fame-type award of the same name which was bestowed on single creators through the early nineties, as well as of the awards programme hosted by the comics biennial Komiks.dk from 2004-2010. The Pings are named after one of the best known characters created by one of the greatest Danish cartoonists, Robert Storm Petersen, aka. Storm P. (1882-1949).

The Pings are a collaboration between the comics site Nummer9, the comics magazine Strip!, the Animation Workshop in Viborg (where a major new cartooning programme was launched last year), and the Storm P. Museum in Copenhagen, and the comics festival Copenhagen Comics. They are awarded in a number of categories in the same manner as so many other awards of their kind.

Ping statuettes lined up, waiting for the winners

This year was the third consecutive the revivified Pings were awarded. It happened at the concert hall Vega in Copenhagen. In a remarkable step up, the Hall of Fame award, given to a cartoonist or other comics person for their life and work in comics, was hosted by the Danish minister of culture, Marianne Jelved, one of the most respected veteran politicians in Denmark. The award went to Nikoline Werdelin, author of the great comic strip Homo Metropolis, which has been running intermittently in Danish newspapers since 1984. (I’ve written an introduction to her and her work here). She was also given the most prestigious award of the night, that for ‘Best Danish Comic’ for her latest collection of Homo Metropolis strips. The Pings, in other words, turned into a celebration of one of Denmark’s greatest living cartoonists.

Among other notable awards, the one for best editorial cartoonist (which was a new category added to the roster this year) went to the incomparable Philip Ytournel who has done more than any other to innovate within his genre in the last half decade or so with his hilarious, formally inventive and frequently intelligent work for the daily Politiken. Last year he upped his game when he wrote and drew an entire installment of the paper’s books section devoted to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Minister of culture Marianne Jelved and Nikoline Werdelin

The award for ‘Best international comic’ published in Danish went to Emmanuel Guibert’s La Guerre d’Alan (aka. Alan’s War), while that for ‘Best international comic’ (ie. not published in Denmark yet) went to Joe Sacco’s The Great War.
Here’s a full overview:

Best Danish Comic: Homo Metropolis 2010-2012 by Nikoline Werdelin

Best International Comic in Danish: Alans krig by Emmanuel Guibert

Best International Comic: The Great War by Joe Sacco

Best comic for children/young readers: Pssst! by Annette Herzog and Katrine Clante

Editorial Cartoonist of the Year: Philip Ytournel (Politiken)

Best Danish online comic: Det sarahkastiske hjørne by Sarah Glerup

Best Danish Debut: Troldmændene fra Vestmannaeyjar by Thomas Mikkelsen

Hall of Fame Award: Nikoline Werdelin

Full disclosure: I sit on the organising committee of the Ping awards and was part of the jury. The Ping is a critics award: nominations are made by contributors to Nummer9 and Strip! while the jury is composed of three more or less continuing members (representing the Danish Comics Council, Nummer9 and the Copenhagen Comics) and four rotating members selected for variety and expertise.

Philip Ytournel with his award

Read more and see photos from the show (there will also be a special video at some point) at the Ping website and Facebook page. Photos by Alexander Almegaard and Niels Larsen.

The Week

Matthias Wivel — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 00:26:12 +0000

Paolo Veronese, The Conversion of Mary Magdalene, about 1548, oil on canvas, 117.5 x 163.5 cm. London, The National Gallery.

In a couple of weeks’ time, we’re opening the first major show of the works of Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese in decades at the National Gallery. Although it falls within my area of responsibility and will therefore occupy much of my time for the next few months, it’s an exhibition I have had nothing to do with, having started at the gallery only a few months ago. But needless to say one I’m looking forward to immensely: it’s a privilege thus to be dropped into the midst of a great project on an artist of immense generosity.

It’s not just that his pictures pull out all the stops, that his art is a rarely paralleled display of elegance, magnificence, and virtuosity, it’s that there is something profoundly touching about those qualities in his work. He is one of the few artists who really understood the lessons of Raphael. His immaculate sense of composition, his grasp of form, two- as well as three-dimensional, his sensitive use of gesture, and the subtlety of his portrayal of human interaction are all elements in what seems to me a distinctly civilising art, to paraphrase Kenneth Clark’s characterisation of Raphael. Contemplating Veronese is not only a joy, it makes you feel better about life and who we are.

That’s the high register. Keep an eye on the NG website for further thoughts and more concrete analysis during the course of the exhibition. I’ll keep you posted here and on twitter.

Links:

“There Are Good Guys and Bad Guys.” Bhob Stewart’s classic essay on/obituary of Wally Wood reprinted at the Comics Journal to mark the passing of its author. RIP. Read it, it is one of the most evocative, personal texts of its kind in comics. Really brings the great, flawed cartoonist to life.

Nikoline Werdelin interviewed. Arguably the greatest living Danish cartoonist, Werdelin has rarely if ever been interviewed about her comics (she has often talked to journalists about other things — life, style, death, and everything in between), so this in-depth, work-oriented interview by Thomas Thorhauge is a major scoop. Unfortunately it is only available in Danish, as is indeed the case with most of her work. English readers can sample her in From Wonderland with Love.

Finally, this uncredited photo, from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, is arresting, sobering, terrible. A reminder that something has to be done there. A no-fly zone blocking the government’s use of their air force remains a good place to start.

Danish Comics of the Year 2011

Matthias Wivel — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 23:11:04 +0000

This year, Danish comics culture is seeing the revival of the Ping Awards, an industry award last given back in the Nineties. Once a hall of fame prize, it is now awards cartoonists in five categories in the manner of the Angoulême Fauves. This year focuses on comics published in 2011, and five Danish comics have been selected in their particular category. Although I didn’t participate in the nomination process, I was involved in organizing the event, and was part of the jury that selected Rikke Bakman’s Glimt as Danish Comic of the Year. So I’m biased, but I can say immediately that it was very hard indeed to select a winner. Here are the five nominees — for my money not just the five best Danish comics of last year, but the strongest showing in Danish comics for a long time.

Almægtig
[A God Somewhere]
by John Arcudi and Peter Snejbjerg
G Floy Studio

Technically a Danish edition of the American edition by DC/Wildstorm, Almægtig is drawn by Denmark’s hardest-working man in mainstream comics showbiz, so let’s call it Danish too. Snejbjerg finds in Arcudi’s smart script about an ordinary man who gains godlike power a perfect match for his sparse chiaroscuro style. Arcudi’s elegant mix of human incident and big ideas challenges Snejbjerg most of the time to work with nuance and precision in place of the pyrotechnics that are otherwise the stock in trade of American genre comics. An intelligent and unpretentious take on that most hackneyed of genre exercises, the “realistic” superhero story, congenially visualized.

Glimt
[Glimpses]
by Rikke Bakman
Aben Maler

A beautifully realized suite of childhood recollections woven into the narrative framework of a single summer’s day spent at the Danish west coast when the author was six. Evocatively drawn in colored pencil, Glimt conveys a gripping sense of being there, as a child, with the glimpses of the adult world beyond the curve of age.

Here’s a preview:

Open publication

“Nostalgia” in Kolor Klimax
by Johan F. Krarup
Fantagraphics

Full disclosure: this short comic appears in an anthology edited by yours truly, but that is not Krarup’s fault! “Nostalgia” documents Krarup’s visit with a well-known Danish collector of comics and Disneyana at a time when his life is coming apart after a divorce. A keen observer and deft writer, Krarup here presents his most affecting human portrait yet, framing the protagonist’s personal crisis in terms of his collector’s yen for order.

Ind fra havet
[Back from the Sea]
by Rikke Villadsen
Aben Maler

This surreal seafarer’s yarn does not conceal its epic ambition to fathom the mysteries of parenthood and mortality, but couches it in humor alternately delirious and down-to-earth. Villadsen mixes overwrought Freudian symbolism with situational comedy and flashes of occluded, yet felt, autobiography to fashion personal mythology on the page that transcends its obvious inspiration in Anke Feuchtenberger’s uncannily smudged pencil-and-charcoal rendering to become a compelling statement on life in its own right.

Here’s a preview:

Open publication

Homo Metropolis
by Nikoline Werdelin
Politiken

One of Denmark’s greatest cartoonists of the last twenty-five years, Werdelin still retains her sharpness. A couple of years ago, when she returned to her long-running daily strip after a hiatus, she adopted a looser, sketchier approach that alleviates certain of her weaknesses as a draftswoman and gives the strip a liberated feel unseen in its earlier iterations. It still delivers the same scabrous social satire though — wickedly funny because it’s true.

This piece is a slightly edited version of my contribution to Paul Gravett’s International Best of 2011 LIst. Here are my Danish Comics of the Year for 2010 and 2009.