Tag Archive for 'Copenhagen Comics'

Hype: Copenhagen Comics 2013

Published on 10. 05. 2013 in comics and cartooning and hype & linkage. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .


This year sees the fifth international comics festival in Copenhagen, this year under the name Copenhagen Comics. I’m biased, but I think the organisers have put together a truly impressing program this year, topping even that of 2010, which was stellar. It’s on the weekend of June 1-2 at Øksnehallen in Copenhagen, with additional events on Friday 19.

Among the international guests are Anke Feuchtenberger, Jaime Hernandez, Melinda Gebbie, Emmanuel Guibert, and Jiro Taniguchi, while on the genre side, people like Jill Thompson, Brian Azzarello, Frazer Irving and Charlie Adlard are representing. As usual, there’ll be tons of events, interviews, workshops, exhibits, and all that.

In addition, we at the Danish Comics Council are planning an academic colloquium at the University of Copenhagen on Friday 19, free and open to all. The theme is teaching comics and comics as teaching tool. An international panel of scholars and cartoonists will be present and yours truly will be on hand to conduct an artist talk with Adlard, about storytelling, The Walking Dead, and cross-media success.

The culmination of the weekend, however, will no doubt be the Ping Awards ceremony on Saturday night. Last year, the the Danish comics website Nummer9.dk and the Danish Comics Council launched this new industry award, named after the beloved Storm P. character from the strip Peter og Ping, in collaboration with the Storm P. Museum. After a sold-out smash of a party last year, we’re looking forward hopefully to topping ourselves with an even more ambitious show. Read more about the show, the awards and the people behind at the Ping website (and on Facebook), and buy your ticket now, before they sell out.

Above: Bunker denizen Thomas Thorhauge’s festival poster. See his process report here.

The Week

Published on 04. 03. 2012 in comics and cartooning, current affairs, film, tv, video and hype & linkage. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .


The week in review

Whew! What a week. It seems the great things that have been brewing in Danish comics for the last few years are finally starting to make waves, what with a year of excellent and innovative homegrown comics, the resurrected Ping Awards, plans proceeding for an official educational track for comics makers at the fine Animation Workshop in Viborg, and the ambitious further development of the comics festival Komiks.dk, which has now changed its name to Copenhagen Comics and will once again be held in Øksnehallen, Copenhagen, in 2013 — bigger and better than ever, if the current signs are to be believed.

It’s all still baby steps of course, and there’s a long way to go before we can talk about genuine consolidation in terms of financial security or cultural clout. As things are, much of all this is run on a volunteer basis and a shoestring budget and it remains hard to muster the support, public or private, for comics accorded to other art forms in the country.

Still, the will seems to be there and good comics continue to be made. The photo above is from the release on Thursday of sometime Bunker denizen and my long-time collaborator (and Danish Comics Council chairman, and Ping director) Thomas Thorhauge’s latest comic, Det sidste ord (‘The Last Word’). The book compiles a series of strips done for the film section of the daily Politiken from 2009-2010, adding two longer, similar strips from elsewhere as well as a brand new one.

The concept is one that harks back to “M”, his contribution to BLÆK, an anthology we edited together in 2006 — a comic reprinted in English in the Fantagraphics/Aben Maler production From Wonderland with Love. Thomas takes authentic quotes from figures of interest and illustrates them in comics form. In the case of the Politiken strips, the focus is a diverse range of personalities from cinema. (One, on Godard, is republished in English here).

In the newspaper, they were primarily fun, satirical mini-portraits of the celebrities involved, but taken together they become much more than that — Thomas has been sensitive to certain types of quotes, dealing with issues of vanity, desire, aging, legacy, and death, and has crafted from them an acutely personal statement on life, all the while producing a very funny book. A direct jump from his last book’s youthful aspirations to something anticipating mid-life reflection. Give it a (second) look.

Photo by Frederik Høyer-Christensen. The entire set is here.

This week’s links:

  • Obama on Iran. The American President talks to Jeffrey Goldberg in anticipation of his meeting today with the Israeli Prime Minster and his address at AIPAC.
  • Carl Th. Dreyer on his métier. Recorded at the Copenhagen cinemathèque in 1968, Dreyer answers questions from film students a few weeks before his death. Fantastic, although sadly not subtitled in English (yet?). (Thanks @monggaard!)
  • Matt Seneca on Guido Crepax. A passionate examination of the comics of the Italian master. Replete with rather shaky assertions, but great on observation.