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.

Tatovøren og klitoris (‘The Tatooist and Clitoris’)
by Rikke Villadsen
Fahrenheit

Rikke Villadsen will, by now, be known to American art comics cognoscenti, having had her first graphic novel, The Sea, published by Fantagraphics in 2018, with her second, Cowboy, slated for release this year. In Denmark she put out her third big book last year, the one here under review, and it’s her best, strangest, most affecting yet. It is marred somewhat by didactic and slightly rambling interspersed text pieces on sexual politics, but one quickly forgets about them while reading this intoxicating comic. The story starts with a woman fainting on a harbour pier and giving birth to a placenta-like speech balloon that grows into a broccoli tree while she is passed out. It disappears and she spends most of the story flicking about with clown’s makeup around her eyes and her jumper pulled up awkwardly to reveal her breasts. Perhaps she is looking for the lost child, perhaps not. She is at various times courted and helped by a warmly stoic man, the Tatooist of the title. They go to India where she meets an amorphic blob that becomes her therapist; she plunks down in a soldiers’ mess hall in the Korean war and proceeds to participate in an air raid in a sequence derived directly from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. And so on. Villadsen is transcribing her dreams to decidedly surreal ends here, with equal amounts humour and horror. The atmosphere is redolent of David Lynch, while her charcoal-with-visible-palimpsests rendering style remains heavily indebted to Anke Feuchtenberger. But despite such obvious sources, Villadsen’s voice is becoming increasingly distinct. She deals with themes of female sexuality and motherhood in ways that are her own, and builds her narrative to a beautifully haunting finish.

My review in Danish newspaper Information.

Death Save
by Rune Ryberg
Forlæns

The death save is a maneuver in pinball whereby you can save a ball that would otherwise be lost down one of the board’s outlines by gently pushing the machine one way, then jerking it in the opposite direction to make the ball ricochet back up into the game. It’s a cheat, but if executed right it will give you a second chance. That’s the central metaphor for this classically conceived coming-of-age story,. At its centre is Bass—drawn as a red bird—who comes to that point in his young life where he has to make important decisions in order not to lose himself to self-destructive impulse along with his friend, the desperado Rick—drawn as a reptile reminiscent of Randall Boggs in Pixar’s Monsters Inc. Both are pinball fanatics, which provides the book with a handy symbolic device in the form of individual gaming situations—played on real, historic pinball machines—that reflect important points in the story. Rune Ryberg stages this drama masterfully, with soft and pliable character designs, swift panel-to-panel propulsion and high-fructose colouring. His training in animation serves him well, not just for his memorable character designs, but also their situation in a believable milieu. The central achievement of Death Save is its urban setting, sampling and combining elements of cities the world over, from Naples to New York, Chicago to Copenhagen. It breathes post-industrial decay, but is touched by a romantic patina. The plot may be a bit predictable and the characters rather typological, but its executed with such passion and energy that this seems secondary. Ryberg deservedly won the Ping Award for Best Danish Comic for it last year (note that Villadsen’s comic fell outside the nomination period).

My review in the Danish newspaper Information.

Dr Murder and the Island of Death
by Emil Friis Ernst
Baggaardsbaroner
More here

Emil Friis Ernst is among the talented recent graduates of the world-class Graphic Storytelling programme at the Viborg Animation Workshop. This was his graduation comic in 2017, but was released in a newly-coloured, English-language edition last year and created a bit of a buzz on the American festival circuit. It’s easy to see why: Friis Ernst has a striking sense of graphic patterning and effect and for dynamic panel-to-panel storytelling, and he tells a spectacularly expressive story rooted in pulp tropes that evokes a distinct sense of melancholia and precocious reflections on growing old. And he colours like a latter-day flower child. Friis Ernst also published his first book-length comic last year too: Reservat, written by crypto-fantasy author Dennis Gade Kofod. It’s a near-future, dystopian story of climate change and revelation, detailing the movement of five different people on a single, apocalyptic day between Copenhagen, the island of Bornholm and Mars. Unfortunately, its writing is rather purple and off-puttingly impersonal. Although slighter, more limited in scope and less visually accomplished, Dr Murder would therefore be my first-stop recommendation for discovering Friis Ernst’s work.

My review of Dr Death and Reservat in the Danish newspaper Information.

Fiesta-Magasinet (‘The Fiesta Magazine’)
by Various authors
Fiesta-forlaget
Last year, a trio of veterans of the Danish comics scene, Mårdøn Smet, Peter Kielland and Johan F. Krarup and revived the kind of comic book concept in which they made their names: the saddle-stitched, occasionally-appearing (mostly) black and white anthology. The result is Fiesta-Magasinet and in many ways it’s like the eighties or nineties all over again: three highly accomplished cartoonists and a bunch of invited talent producing short strips purely for fun, and pouring their heart into it. Smet continues to refine his particular type of cartoon (e)scatology and philosophy, pushing the limits of cartoon readability while aiming his always mordant satire at identity politics; Kielland finds a winning formula by having dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un and Recep Tayyip Erdogan tell us about their comics collections; and Krarup continues his long-running, harrowingly funny adventures of the dysfunctional and homosocial everyday heroes Bruce and Robin. Fiesta has so far appeared with surprising regularity — five issues are out already, plus a special edition devoted to the end of the world. Excellent work by such underground luminaries and up-and-comers as Line Høj Høstrup, Christian Henry, Clara Jetsmark, Nanna Amstrup, and others are the icing on the cake. Who would have thought such an an anachronistic endeavor would become a platform for some of the best Danish comics of the moment?

Grus (‘Gravel’)
Anna Degnbol
Fahrenheit
In her second graphic novel, Degnbol tells the story of a woman who returns to the small countryside town in which she grew up to tend to her mother after the latter has fallen into a coma. Degnbol marshals the well-established narrative device of physical homecoming triggering a return to an unresolved past with great sensitivity and narrative purpose. The flashbacks she interweaves from the protagonist’s youth are pitch-perfect renditions of high school anxiety and abandon, while the tersely staged present-tense narrative combines empathetic psychological realism with a bona fide ghost story of the kind that might feel contrived, but reads as an entirely natural enhancement of the story. Degnbol’s visual storytelling is unfailingly clear while suggestively textured in ways that are reminiscent of cartoonists as different as Debbie Drechsler, Jason Lutes, and Edward Gorey. This book establishes Degnbol as a major emerging voice in Danish comics.

Tusindfryd (‘Daisies’)
by Signe Parkins
Cobolt/Aben Maler
Parkins is amongst the most imaginative and provocative drawers in Danish cartooning. In this, her most satisfyingly resolved book to date, she combines more or less randomly generated verse with free-form drawing to craft a sustained lyrical mediation on sex, gender, and nature. She avidly employs organic metonymies, such as plants and insects doubling as signifiers of human procreation and ageing, as well as motifs of dissection and small-box categorisation to describe the way we inevitably order our life. One senses suppressed rage in the otherwise light-footed, intoxicatingly flowering proceedings and it seems to be here that Parkins needs to concentrate her energies in the future, without flinching, if she wishes to take things to the next level. In the meantime, these are exhilaratingly distinct and enjoyable comics that deserve an international audience.

Hjem (‘Homes’)
by Bue Bredsdorff
Basilisk
A small slip-cased collection of three thematically-linked minicomics produced by Bredsdorff over the last few years, this publication pulls into focus his distinct talents as a visual storyteller and chronicler of the intersection between place and memory. “Huset i Sønderhå” (‘The House in Sønderhå’) threads together individual verbal-visual details, that are simultaneously memories, of the artist’s childhood home in the Danish countryside; “Husumgade 30” (´Husum Street 30´) does the same for his bachelor’s pad in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen, while “Ly” (‘Shelter’) mixes things up by detailing visually the construction of a small wooden house in almost DIY-catalogue fashion, but rendered with a thin, nervous line that enunciates emotional investment. The contrast to the smudged pencil of the preceding booklets, “Ly” brings Bredsdorrf’s memories into the present and applies them to the fundamental theme of (literal) homemaking, of constructing where we belong, in every sense.

Fortress
by Sofie Louise Dam
The Animation Workshop
Last year saw the first class graduate from the newly-established four-year Visual Storytelling programme at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, a major new institutional presence in Danish comics and cartooning. Sofie Louise Dam is one of several distinct talents to have emerged from that first crop and her graduation comic is a remarkably confident work of comics reportage. Marking the centenary of Denmark’s sale of its three West Indian Colonies, St Thomas, St John and St Croix, Dam travelled there to meet an American descendant of Danish-owned slaves, a contemporary of hers, to learn together of their shared past. She works in a sketchy, digitally drawn line and two tones of colour reminiscent of Frank Santoro’s work to detail a fairly banal tourist visit as well as to summarise in her narration the discussions and thoughts it brought to the two travellers. While no profound insights are gained, it’s an earnest and quietly powerful chronicle of discovery that prompts questions of Danish self-understanding through the elucidation of a past we as a nation have collectively wiped from our imagined community.

Here are my picks for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

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.

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.

Aske (‘Ash’)
by Mikkel Ørsted Sauzet
Aben Maler

Rendered entirely in red ballpoint pen, this is an intense, visceral and — in large part because of the bright, busily hatched luminescent lifework — almost delirious wordless account of the beginnings of the 1791-1804 slave rebellion in Haiti. Although visual research clearly went into bringing the story to life, this is far from a dry historical account. It is, rather, a potent effort on the author’s part to express outrage at the legacy of colonialism as it endures today through very basic, painfully empathetic storytelling. While undeniably a little heavy-handed, and visually clearly indebted to the ballpoint paintings of Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum (who also inspired the great Dominique Goblet to pick up the Bic), it is as undeniably an impressive first effort by the Danish-French author, which was justly awarded the Ping award for best debut at the Copenhagen Comics Festival last summer. Read a 17-page sampler here, an interview (in Danish) here, and watch a video interview (also in Danish) here.

Ting, jeg gjorde (‘Things I did’)
by Maren Uthaug
Politiken

Uthaug is quite a phenomenon in Danish comics. After having built a sizeable (well, huge, for comics) and fiercely loyal audience on her personal blog for the last couple of years through a combination of deft, observant writing and hilarious cartooning about her daily life as a budding writer-artist and mother of four, she exploded into wider public consciousness by winning a widely-publicised competition for a spot in the daily newspaper Politiken—the most prestigious and no doubt inspiring place to be for a strip cartoonist in Denmark (full disclosure: I was on the jury). The strip Ting, jeg gjorde (examples) continues in the same vein as her blogged diary, but is more universal in reach, using her personal experience as a springboard for perceptive exposition about life in Denmark right now. Her line is deceptively primitive. She works exclusively with remarkably expressive stick figures, capturing a wide range of posture, gesture and facial expression with startling simplicity. Her work might seem somewhat lightweight at first glance, concerned as it is with banal and at times somewhat bourgeois happenstance, but she brings to it unsentimental wit, intelligence born of experience, and even at times genuinely poetic nerve. In addition to drawing the strip, she has self-published a highly successful compilation of her blogged comics, Ellers går det godt (‘Otherwise everything is fine’), as well as an even more successful and critically acclaimed debut novel, Og sådan blev det (‘And that’s how it went’), which weaves her Sami heritage into a tale of growing up different. This has clearly been Uthaug’s year. Read an interview (in Danish) here.

Rockworld
by Søren Glosimodt Mosdal & Jacob Ørsted
Fahrenheit

This is thinly-veiled autobiography upgraded to generational social satire. Originally released as three individual comic book issues between 2007-2012, this book narrates the misadventures of the hopeless aesthete Bjørn and his equally hopeless slacker friends Steen and Totte. Conceived as a Danish pendant to Peter Bagge’s Hate!, it treads familiar ground in its recounting of late-night fiascos and youthful arrogance crashed, but its astute satire on how things like musical taste come to define and distort one’s identity in those formative years when one subsists on canned food and beer transcend the commonplace, becoming an indictment of, as much as a love letter to, youth and growing into maturity. Plus it’s hilarious—Mosdal, here working in his thinnest, most cutting Viennese Secession-line fathoms a remarkably broad and precise expresssive range, from the goofy to the boozy, and the dialogue evokes a time and a place in the Nineties that is becoming increasingly distant, but has its natural analogues today. And the set-pieces are priceless: from Bjørn being robbed in the shitter by a gang of psycho dwarves, to the contents of a ripe, yellowed boil on his ass blowing up in the face of a buxom autist in a lake deep in the Swedish forest. It’s that kind of comic. Read the first issue in English here. Watch a video interview (in Danish) with the authors here, and read another, fun one here.

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

Stig & Martha
by Mårdøn Smet
Aben Maler

This slim, tall tome collects one of the hidden gems of Danish comics of the past twenty years. Since it first saw the light of day in the seminal anthology magazine Fahrenheit in 1992, Mårdøn Smet’s (e)scathological gag strip has led a liminal and rather intermittent existence in Danish comics, providing small revelations for the intrepid few. Now a wider, if still discerning, audience gets the chance with this near-complete collection. Smet has jettisoned a few early efforts and redrawn a few others in glorious watercolour, fashioning a seamless whole of what was always a shatter of fragments.

Eponymously titled, the strip centers on two characters: short and tall, male and female, ambitious and sensitive, rational and emotional. In Smet’s hands, this classic formula becomes a vehicle for sacred reflection through profane humor. Smet’s line was built as a pastiche on Dutch masters Fred Julsing and Daan Jippes, but has long transcended its paragons to become an almost cryptogtaphic idiom, where buoyant dynamism is encoded in multitudinous swoops and curls. An embodiment of the failure of language, appropriately set in pantomime – everybody can read it, if they are willing to brave the line. Smet himself describes it as a kind of ‘waste product’, the art shed by his despair. It is grim, but very human, centering on irrepressible if always vain aspiration. Tense and beautiful.

Here’s a preview:

For previous lists, here are mine from 2009, 2010, and 2011.

Many will be familiar with this popular series covering everything from books to wine. The remarkable thing about the comics one is that it is the first convincing attempt to define an international canon for the art form. The book is of course skewed in favor of work available in English, but Paul has interpreted that limitation in the widest possible way, including an amazingly diverse and international field of comics from Töpffer to the present, including a fair amount never (or not yet) translated into English.

Individual national editions will make replacements, I’m told, which is really to the detriment of a remarkably coherentbook. Paul recruited 67 comics experts from all over the world, making it a wonderfully rich resource. And this is only enhanced by his decision to order the entries chronologically, adding an eye-opening historical dimension to the presentation. In addition to being a great reference, it’s thus also a short (” “) history of of world comics. I really encourage you to take a look at it.

Full disclosure: I was one of the 67, although my contribution is rather small. I wrote the entries on the Danish comics included: Storm P.’s Peter & Ping, Palle Nielsen’s Orpheus & Eurydice, Claus Deleuran’s Rejsen til Saturn, and Nikoline Werdelin’s Homo Metropolis, as well as (somewhat randomly) on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Strikes Again (aka. DK2).

Check out Paul’s website for more information on the book, its contributors and the comics. He plans to update it regularly with reviews, interviews and supplementary material. For Danish readers, here’s a notice on it for which I provided some comments a couple of months ago.