The Ping Awards gala last night? A success, no doubt about it. Sold out, full house, crowded and fun! The young event team had pulled out all the stops and were almost entirely stress-free. Things just worked.
Anyway, this was a major event in the small subculture that Danish comics, and one we hope will continue for many years. It was done on a shoestring budget and came off looking like, well, not like a million kroner, but really neat. And there was a real atmosphere of enthusiasm for comics, even from the media who have covered the event surprisingly soberly and smartly.
As for the Danish prize winners, they were remarkable not only for their quality, but also for what they tell us about Danish comics right now. I’ve written at some length about each of the nominees for Best Danish Comic for Paul Gravett’s Best of 2011 rundown, and the general conclusion bears repeating here: this is perhaps the strongest showing in a single year of the last decade or more. A long time.
Finally, it seems that Danish comics are shedding years of polished euro-mainstream fetishization of craft at the expense of ideas and expression. These comics have heart, they want to tell you something. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the majority of them are by women.
With Danish comics culture having been male-dominated for way longer than those even of our closest neighbors in Sweden and Finland, it seems women understandably have stayed away. The great Nikoline Werdelin has been the main exception to the rule for years. But now women creators are making waves like never before with strong, original work.
That’s just one factor of course, but perhaps the most spectacular one right now. More generally, however, a new generation of cartoonists less concerned with the trends of the past is emerging, and considering the fact that the two big and longstanding big publishers, Carlsen and Egmont fused and went on more or less to implode a few years back, a surprising number of excellent comics from around the world are still being translated and published in Danish.
There’s still much room for improvement of course, and it remains a rather small fragile comics culture, but things are looking up!
Here are this year’s Ping winners:
Best Danish Debut: Post-it monstre by John Kenn Mortensen
Best Comic for a Younger Audience: Ankomsten by Shaun Tan
Best International Comic in Danish: Speedy Ortiz dør by Jaime Hernandez
Best International Comics : Habibi by Craig Thompson
Best Danish Online Comic: Signe Parkins & Drawings by Signe Parkins
The Hall of Fame Award: Rolf Bülow and Søren Pedersen, founders of Fantask
Best Danish Comic: Glimt by Rikke Bakman
Photo above by Niels Larsen. Check his Flickr set from the night here.
By Steffen Rayburn Maarup
Tonight is the night of the grand 
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Adam Yauch RIP
As the stray reader might have noticed, the blog has been dormant for a while here, feeling the effects of pressure elsewhere. I can’t let the passing of Adam Yauch, aka. MCA of the Beastie Boys pass in complete silence, however.
I refer you to the New York Times obituary for the lowdown on his remarkable career, and New York Magazine‘s oral history for a record of the auspicious beginnings of the Beastie Boys. Here, I’ll merely add that they were always the exception to the rule: three Jewish kids staking an entirely credible claim in hip hop that has never been challenged, communicating with a wide, predominantly white audience at a time when the genre had not yet become the commercial juggernaut we came to see through the nineties, and doing it without losing any cred with the hardcore audience. Part of their innovation, and surely instrumental to their success, is that they took the humor and irony of old school rap and gave it their own twist, maintaining and developing it over the years as the rest of hip hop largely forgot it.
They may not ever been a the center of things in hip hop, but always retained their spot simply because they were doing their thing so convincingly. Something no other white act, not even 3rd Bass or Eminem, were able to achieve more than momentarily.
With Paul’s Boutique they took things to the next level. This is abstract, at times entirely instrumental, hip hop before such a thing existed in any large measure. A record that expanded the very idea of sampling as a creative avenue in music in ways only few other artists — primarily The Bomb Squad — had been able to until then. Not only is it hard to imagine DJ Shadow, Company Flow, Anticon, or many other city-to-suburban hip hop pioneers of the late nineties and early naughts without the example of the Dust Brothers and the Beasties, they also anticipated developments in more true school experimental hip hop, from Native Tongues to Hieroglyphics, and more fundamentally they surely helped shape the evolution of electronic music in ways that remain to be examined.
Besides grounding the group with his awesome bass playing, Yauch’s raspy basso was the foundation of the three-way exchange on the mic the trio developed over the years. Beyond that he was the straight guy to Mike D and Adrock’s clownery, crucially tempering their frivolity by dropping the odd bits of science around his own tomfoolery. The moral center to the group. Rest in peace.