Så er vi tilbage med en røvful anbefalinger til sommerens læsning og generelle overlevelse. Og vi har en masse gæsteanbefalere med! Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9!

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.

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.