This Sunday saw the fourth Comics and Beats event in Copenhagen. Organised by the Danish Comics Council, it is a live drawing event where cartoonists improvise to music provided by a DJ and prompts given by the audience and the MC. This time, it took place as part of a charity event in Copenhagen’s Fælledpark, […]

The highly publicized child pornography conviction last month of a Swedish translator, for possessing manga which allegedly depicted sexualised minors or minors engaging in sexual acts, is but the latest manifestation of a debate concerning what constitutes child pornography that has been going for a number of years. The chairman of the Swedish Comics Society, […]

I was just reminded today of how depressingly treacherous it has become to navigate the Mohammed cartoon affair and its religious-cultural discontents. The day before yesterday it was reported worldwide that the upcoming memoirs of ‘Bomb in Turban’ cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Manden bag stregen (’The Man Behind the Line’), would be published with the cartoon […]

Last week, another of the pioneers of early hip hop culture, Rammellzee passed away. A versatile multimedia artist and cultural theorist, he remained at the margins of hip hop culture as it evolved into a worldwide, commercially successful phenomenon, marching to the beat of his own drum.
From hitting the A train is 1974 and bombing […]

Jesus is dying slowly, life ebbing from him, ebbing, when suddenly the heavens overhead open wide and God appears in the same attire he wore in the boat, and His words resound throughout the earth, This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus realized then that he had been tricked, as […]

I haven’t talked much about my Ph. D. dissertation, “Colour in Line — Titian and Printmaking”, here at the Bunker, despite it having occupied my life more than any other intellectual project for the last five years or so. I guess because it is still very much a work in progress, but I figure it […]

Gary Shider of Plainfield, NJ and long-time funkateer of Parliament-Funkadelic fame, has passed away. He was the one in the diaper, rocking the guitar. Plus he was one of the architects of the P-Funk sound, overshadowed in the earlier years by fellow guitarist Eddie “Maggot Brain” Hazel but was just as important a constituent of […]

Undertegnede og Thorhaugen optræder nu på Nummer9s web-TV-kanal med et par interviews udført af Cav Bøgelund og Tue Søttrup under tegneseriefestivalen Komiks.dk, til festen fredag aften. Bogmærk kanalen — der kommer meget mere, fra en masse forskellige danske tegneseriefolk.

Just paying respects to one of the great illustrators of comics, one of the masters of texture. The above story, “Food for Thought”, drawn in collaboration with Roy Krenkel for EC’s Incredible Science Fiction (full story available here) is a case in point: though never a great naturalist, Williamson brings the alien world to teeming […]

Regular readers might be aware that I was recently involved in the planning of an academic conference on comics at the University of Copenhagen. It was called Contemporary Comics and took place on Friday May 21st. It featured 12 international speakers, as well as the Canadian scholar Jacques Samson, who delivered the keynote address, and […]

Dennis Hopper RIP.

This year’s festival in Copenhagen promises to be the best yet. Friday night saw the launch party with the customary awards ceremony. As usual, most Danish comics people were there, providing the base of a fine crowd with many visitors from abroad: besides the two triumvirata — Burns, Clowes, Ware & Gibbons, O’Niell, Quitely — […]

For better or worse. I’m not sure what, at the end of the day, this will do for the cause of reason and compassion in this matter, but a situation where drawing certain things will net you death threats and attempts on your life is simply unacceptable. Whatever the history of systemic injustices or problems […]

This wicked little film by Andreas Wykade sums up my state of mind this cartoon-crazed week pretty accurately. Sleep well…

For those of you who read Danish, my piece on Guru is now up in translated form over at Rapspot.
Also, I wanted to plug my man Frederik Høyer-Christenen’s photos — we both attended some of Gang Starr’s great shows in Copenhagen in the early 90s. Unfortunately, Frederik didn’t bring his camera to their first […]