Not interested to read about the superman & donald duck. Keep that stuff away from the topic, thanks..
When I started my so called "underground career", it was pretty much through the comics. In finland the boom of independent zine culture walked quite a lot hand in hand with self made/self published mini comics. It was alternative outlet for creativity what walked hand in hand with a lot of punk/experimental/metal and whatever. You could go to local library and find pretty rough materials there on comic department. During the years many up's & down's been there, but the zine culture changed to direction where many guys started own publishing company, who's material is technically as high quality as anything done by major publishers.
Instead of old times, a lot of people actually focus on getting their stuff to worldwide people.
In Finland, there is little crossover with experimental sound & comic arts. As example one could say Roope Eronen, which is utmost obscure naivistic creator. If one can mention people like Mike Diana or Henry Darger with their amusing looking things, Roope Eronen is not as harsh what comes to sexual or violent content, but his technique and stories (or lack of it) are surreal and absurd. Most often they seem like childrens comics gone all wrong.
I know this thing is nowadays probably exclusively associated with "hipster noise", where the stoner doodles and stuff like that are perhaps more rule than exception. And at the same time I feel disturbed by very same "who care", "lets do some garbage" mentality what is in noise-drone-jams and aimless doodles, but I admit that there are some pretty good materials as well. When I saw the art exhibition related to NFF couple years ago, it felt like brutal let down. Perhaps couple items worth to see, but others were pretty much the culmination of all what I think is bad in doodle-arts, sketchbook pages on display and all that.
Roope Eronen:
I've seen him in noise performance. This guy have collaborated with Avarus and Pylon, which some people probably know? Lal lal lal label etc. who had festival in helsinki end of 2009.
Quite recent reading was Amanda Vähämäki "pullapelto" and maybe worth to mention, since it's been translated to english, french and I think also Swedish? Book explains in liner notes that this was part of "alice experiment", meant to explore the borders between text and pictures, dreams and reality, childhood and adulthood, language and time. Which is, like many may have noticed in my past texts, one of high interests of mine. The dominating influence of Lewis Carroll, is simply something that remains interesting for years and years. At the same time when you look at the book, you can't get much more stereotypical female "emo comics" approach, but in other hand it doesn't really matter. When you look beyond the doodled messy pencil images, many of them just constitute already individually as piece of art. Don't know how the other versions are, but Daada (recently stopped comic published in Lahti/finland) did their best to make it as artbook, rather than your typical comicbook.
QuoteThe Bun Field
Amanda Vähämäki
March 2009This collection of five short comics stories by new talent Amanda V�h�m�ki is drawn together with an intriguing disjointed rhythm and delicious pencil-smudged style, and infused with a sense of abbreviated adolescence and a kind of grey sky banality. On the surface the stories are characterized by a surreal ebb-and-flow, but each also possesses a deep sense of foreboding and hurt, and maintains a biting sense of humor.
The Bun Field is V�h�m�ki�s first graphic novel, which has been published in several languages. In this story, a young girl dreams of a dinosaur eating Donald Duck; wakes to find a bald, hulking stranger sharing her breakfast; leaves to take a car trip with a bear; falls and breaks a tooth, to have it replaced by an impatient dentist�from his dog�s mouth no less; and pays back the favor by plowing a field of buns. Likewise, young people and anthropomorphic animals commingle in dreamy landscapes throughout the other tales collected in this edition, performing mundane tasks that are skewed with an absurd and fantastic edge. What do you get when you mix fish guts, jungle gyms, stamps, barmaids, soda pop and burning cities?
V�h�m�ki�s unique ideas are equally matched by her tactile drawings, creating a palpable world that is fresh and compelling. The Bun Field and Other Stories comprises an introduction to the work of a new artist not to be missed.
Paperback, 8 x 8 inches, 96 pages, b/w.
Perhaps neither of these 2 artists are something the most relevant, but just something I happened to read couple days ago, so can work as start for topic...
