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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
This Week’s Article: Finnish Comics
Posted: May 15, 2011
This week’s article first appeared in Finnish on May 11th 2011 in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. For those of you not fluent in Finnish, I’ve translated the article in to English!
Few countries have made such an impressive plea for attention and acclaim for their comics as Finland with the publication in English of the first Finnish Comics Annual. But do they deserve it? How do Finnish comics, or sarjakuva (serial pictures), really compare to the output of other nations? Fortunately, editor, journalist and critic Ville Hänninen does not attempt some generalised impression of the state of all Finnish comics today or stick to safe ‘Greatest Hits’ or a Top Twenty of Best-Sellers. Instead, he provocatively cherry-picks 33 stories by 20 “real virtuosos”, all solo writer-artists who do everything, born between 1958 and 1982, eight of them women. Cumulatively, they represent Hänninen’s perception of a rich seam in Finnish comics of “bizarre atmospheres and peculiar worlds”, of “realities where something is not quite right”, comics that can be “a bit strange, sure, but damn funny.” Read the full article here…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
