about

Welcome to the Metabunker!

This is my personal weblog to which I regularly post all sorts of content — from informal journal entries to different kinds of criticism and comment. Both text and image, often in synthesis. It also incorporates the work of friends and colleagues on an irregular basis.

The lingua franca of the Metabunker is English, and most of the content you find here will be in that language. I am Danish, however, and some of the content posted here will be specifically for a Danish readership and therefore in Danish. Please accept our apologies in advance if you cannot read it.

I am an art historian with an MA from Columbia University and a Ph. D from the University of Cambridge. Specializing in the Italian Renaissance, my dissertation was on Titian as a print designer and -producer. I have since published several articles on the subject, with more to come. My professional working life finally kicked off a few years ago when I briefly served as a curatorial assistant at the Morgan Library, New York. I then worked for two years as a research fellow at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and am now Curator of Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting at the National Gallery in London.

Since 2000, I have worked as a comics journalist, critic, and publisher, initially for my own critical journal on comics Rackham, published in Denmark between 2000-2005, and online between 2002-2006. I have edited and written a number of books on and with Danish and Nordic comics, with Forandringstegn (2004), BLÆK (2006), and Kolor Klimax (2011) as the most notable.

In 2009 I joined a number of like-minded people to found the Danish Comics Council, a non-profit working to advance knowledge and appreciation of comics in Denmark.

Among other things, we have been involved in the establishment in 2013 of a state-approved educational track for comics at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, the placement of the collections of the long-dormant Danish Comics Museum with the Storm P. Museum in Copenhagen, the launch in 2010 of a Danish comics site, Nummer9, and the establishment of an annual Danish award for comics, the Ping, in 2012. I write irregularly for The Comics Journal, The Hooded Utilitarian and for the Danish hip hop site, RapSpot.

For more details on my work, and that of the other inhabitants of the Metabunker, visit the ‘works’ section. And please send us an email and let us know what you think!

Matthias Wivel