Sweden’s Small Press Expo was held April 25th and 26th in downtown Stockholm’s Kulturhuset, (or “Culture House”) above the comics library, Serieteket. The state-sponsored program invited members from around the globe to participate in this year’s festival, a free event that pulled comparable crowds to last year’s 5000 visitors. Attendees flocked to tables of imported books and sought out the latest releases from Swedish companies, immune to the economy for just one weekend.
The theme of this year’s show was international friendship, and publishers from Germany, Italy, Norway, and Finland were present, along with comic creators from the UK, Russia, France and Belgium. The US was represented by Top Shelf, Buenaventura Press, and Sparkplug Press, and creators Lauren Weinstein and Jeffery Brown. The release of Fumlig, the Swedish translation of Clumsy—Brown's autobiographical story of romantic struggle—led to a media storm centered around Brown, who made several appearances on TV and radio. At the Fumlig release party on Saturday night, a crowd waited in the cold for attendees to leave, the 400-person capacity venue completely filled.
Johannes Klennel, editor of the Swedish anthology Galago, said “The festival this year was the best so far. It was great to have everyone here from overseas and also the mood of the scene is still great. The summer of love in Swedish comics does not seem to end just yet.”
The Swedish comics scene is fairly comparable to the US, down to the widely held notion that comics are for kids, except that kids can be seen pouring over comics in the street in Stockholm, and rooting through bins of old Donald Duck comics in used “serier” shops. Moomin play sets are in toy stores, and children’s comics can be found in every magazine rack. Local comic and sci-fi chain Science Fiction Bokhandeln stocked manga in Swedish, English, and Japanese in comparable numbers to those found in a typical Borders, , as well as an extensive fantasy and horror novel selection. Amateur manga was prevalent at the show itself, the bulk of “fansins” drawn in this style.
Stockholm and Malmö, in southern Sweden, even correspond to indie comic cities New York and Portland, with Malmö home to the comics college Kvarnby, one of the two schools with comics programs in Sweden.
But the most noteworthy work can be found in the Swedish art comics scene. Galago is a quarterly magazine along the lines of MOME, if more psychedelic and outré, where many talents get cultivated before moving on to graphic novels. After last year’s US release of the Galago anthology, From the Northern Lights, Top Shelf plans to put out works by Simon Gardenförs, a prolific cartoonist and rap artist, and Kolbeinn Karlsson, whose book Trollkungen debuted at the show. (See PWCW's "Top Shelf Gets Sweded".)
The most unique event of the show was the Swedish Academy of Hatgubbe judging the submissions of the twentieth annual “Hate Guy” contest. A Hate Guy is usually doodled while on the phone or without much thought, and fills the viewer with revulsion and hatred for the character. The eight judges dismissed submissions for being too ambitious or professional looking, and gave serious critiques to drawings of muscle men and disturbingly cheerful kids eating ice cream. The ambiguous criteria were debated on the stage, but were perhaps best expressed by one judge: “Hate is a feeling of joy.”
