New Swedish Books. Spring 2016 1
NEW SWEDISH BOOKS LIFE STORIES IN PANELS AND BALL
OONS Comics The Swedish comics scene is pulsing with life, and quality and creativity levels are high. While the number of comics being published is relatively small, new artists and publishers keep popping up in an increasingly diverse market, with genres ranging from science fiction to horror to feminist satire, literary adaptations and artistic experimentation. Realism has always been a key part of modern Swedish literature, and graphic literature is no exception to this. The breakthrough for realism in Swedish comics came in the 1990s, when Daniel Ahlgren, Mats Jonsson and Åsa Grennvall made their debuts with portrayals of their immediate surrounding, drawn with ironic (and even cynical) humour, and intense darkness in both narrative and ink. The inspiration frequently came from similar, contemporary movements in the USA and Canada, in which artists of the everyday like Harvey Pekar, Joe Matt, Julie Doucet and Seth turned themselves inside-out in order to portray their own subjective realities. Time has passed, but realism has continued to be a major theme in Swedish comic art. Whereas the Swedish comic realists of the 90s often chose to look inwards and dig where they stood, many of today’s representatives of the genre tend to train their sights outwards and away, working on a biographical instead of an autobiographical level. Their narratives draw on the big things within the small, or use the self as a basis for something approaching reportage. Sometimes it’s pure navel-gazing, but as Åsa Grennvall so rightly points out in her afterword to Klara Wiksten’s graphic novel The Days: Nilleditions, 2012), there is much to be discovered in or on the other side of one’s navel: ‘You might find answers that seem hidden from the surface.’ In this year’s comics, there’s a clear trend towards narratives based on life stories. They often focus on people from the margins or to the side of our wellstructured societies. They take marginalisation and vulnerability, rootlessness and a longing to fit in as their subjects. From fanatical football fans to immigrants engaged in off-the-books work, from prostitutes and prostitutors to adopted children seeking their roots. This spring’s graphic novel harvest offers up a clamour of urgent life tales. 56