That’s this year’s potato harvest. One full litre! V^(oo)^V

Earlier in the year I had several litres of radishes. The leaves were very tasty too — I used them like spinach in my daily pasta sauce.

I also grew cucumber and dill, but as the summer grew hotter, they were very unhappy in the wind and glaring sun of my 4th floor southwest-facing windowsill. Three little deformed cucumbers still managed to grow big enough to eat, and they tasted okay.  (There are no photos because it was too depressing.)

However, now I’m renting a little piece of land outside the city. It’s a bit neglected, so I’m slowly fixing up the buildings and preparing the garden for next year. I’m too lazy to ever bring a good camera (usually I’ve had too much other stuff to carry), so I don’t have many good photos from there yet.

I test planted some seed potatoes that I had left, and at least one of them seems to be sprouting, and the slugs haven’t eaten it yet. There are quite a lot of slugs in the area. Perhaps that’s why my neighbour grows all his stuff in cold frames. I have a kind of greenhouse, so I will try to grow the things the slugs like the most in there, and the less attractive plants outdoors. I’m also trying a bit to attract hedgehogs with nice piles of leaves and twigs in quiet corners of the garden.

The wildlife certainly is really fascinating in this garden. There are hundreds of spiders, of many different kinds, some really huge. Once I watched one spider catch a fly that had been annoying me as I was drawing comics. The fly got caught in the net the spider had woven in a window, and the spider rushed there and rolled it up in web, then carried it up to its hiding place, presumably to suck out its juices. The spiders are very nice, and I have to be careful so I don’t disrupt their habitat too much.
There are two ponds in the garden, and in the big one there are frogs. I’ve seen one big green frog (sunbathing on the edge of the pond) and one medium sized brown frog (strolling around on the lawn). They make noises like human babies coughing themselves to death.

What I’ve already harvested from the garden:
- One (1) hazelnut: there is a big hazel bush, but apparently it doesn’t have a lot of nuts.
- Some plums: Somehow I missed the plum season (maybe I was thinking they should still grow bigger or something, d’oh), so most plums were overripe before I even realised. I ate some of the last good plums this weekend, and they were very tasty. In any case, the nice birds and insects have certainly been appreciating them.

What I’ll hopefully still harvest this year:
- Grapes
- Rose hips
- Potatoes
- Spinach, radishes, rucola and maybe some other stuff from the greenhouse

I got some seeds for interesting stuff like “Bear’s garlic“, Welsh onion, Mitsuba (only because of the name, yes …), and Tatar bread plant (!). It will be exciting to see if any of it will grow …

Click the picture to go read about how Willie became a vegetarian …

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45 down, 42 to go. V`(oo)´V

Click the picture to go read.

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42 down, 45 to go. V`(oo)´V

Click the picture to go read.

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41 down, 46 to go. V`(oo)´V

!!!OBS! Varning för massiva spoilers om man följer min serie Drivgods…!!!

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(The Swedish child pornography law and what comics characters think about it

Click here to continue reading.

!!! Warning! Massive spoiler warnings for those who are following my comic Driftwood … !!!)

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* Läs mer om bakgrunden till fallet, bl.a. varför husrannsakan genomfördes, i den dömdes egna berättelse: Den dömde uttalar sig

* Läs om barnpornografilagen hos polisen

* Artikel och länksamling om fallet ur serieperspektiv hos Seriefrämjandet

* Facebook-gruppen Stop comics censorship in Sweden

* Tanja Suhinina skriver väldigt bra om barn och sex (något som jag ju inte alls tar upp i den här teckningen)

* Lisa Medin kommenterar debatten och visar vägen till konstruktiva protestformer – kanske det vettigaste jag läst hittills

* Tomas Antila och Sara Berntsson skriver extremt bra om hur det känns att bli utpekad som pedofil

* “Jag är inte en tecknad figur” – ett blogginlägg från en person som utsatts för sexuella övergrepp som barn

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English translation:

According to Swedish [and Australian, Canadian and New Zealand] law, this is child pornography.

In June 2010, the Swedish child pornography law was for the first time tried on drawings, when one of the most renowned translators and experts of Japanese comics in Sweden was convicted by the Uppsala district court of possessing child pornography and sentenced to pay 24,800 Swedish Crowns (approximately €2,650 or $3,400) in fines. The possession consisted of 51 erotic drawings (some of them identical copies) of Japanese comics characters, which the district court deems to be under 18 years of age.
Does this mean that, for example, depictions in comics of child sexual abuse, autobiographical stories about the artist’s first sexual experiences, or naked children can be classified as child pornography? Are tens of thousands of Swedish comics readers and almost all comics publishers actually criminal offenders?

Willie: Okay, it’s like this: I’m 17, and he is 27. We just slept with each other. If you, looking at this image, are in Sweden, you have just committed a crime. According to Swedish law, it’s perfectly fine for us to have sex, since the age of consent is 15 years (unless I’m in a position of dependency to him, like if he was my teacher, guardian, priest, etc. – then the limit is at 18). But it’s illegal to distribute “pornographic” images and to look at “pornographic” images made by someone else which depict people “who are, or appear to be, under 18 years old”.
Now, I don’t suppose everyone thinks it’s all that arousing to look at me naked, but it is totally up to the judge to deem whether an image is pornographic or not.

Aeron: I think it’s arousing, so I guess quite many judges would, too.

Willie: This thing about “appearing to be under 18″ is pretty absurd, because I won’t look all that different when I’m 18, 19 or 20 years old. For example, like a lot of other women, I will always have small breasts.

Aeron: There may be a loophole in the law if the image can be deemed to have “artistic value”. I don’t know if that applies to this image, considering how crappy the perspective is and how your arms are a bit short.

Willie: But the most absurd thing is that exactly the same rules apply to drawings as to photographs. Even though pornographic photographs of children are made with real human beings who are really underage, and thus are documented instances of sexual abuse of children! While drawings are pure fantasy! Meanwhile, it is perfectly legal to depict underage people in sexual situations in text!
When you look at my body language, I seem to be a bit tense. But in fact I don’t have any feelings at all about being drawn like this, because I do not exist, except in the imagination of the artist and the readers! I cannot be mistreated, because I do not exist.

Aeron: Actually, it’s quite flattering that the Swedish law is so concerned about us comics characters. But unfortunately we are totally incapable of appreciating it, because we are only projections of the perverted fantasies of the artist and the readers – in our case perhaps oedipus complexes and fetishes for Russians, ears, noses or leftist girls … Should these fantasies really be forbidden by law?

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* English-language summary of the case

* Neil Gaiman: Why defend icky freedom of speech?

* Conspiracy theories about how the law may in fact be all about Anti-Piracy

* Swedish Facebook group Stop comics censorship in Sweden

We actually don’t have any documentation of the main show, where we told the story about the wee wild piggy who finds a tank in the forest, set to the tone of all the songs I could find about pigs and/or tanks that I liked.

We do have some photos from the second show we did, though, which was entirely improvised, and even more fun, anyway.

The following photos were graciously made by the very sweet Hermano Silva:

Ilan suggested I draw “Pig Island”, as described in the song by Sandra Boynton, performed by Scott Bakula(!) – my new favourite song ever …

“All over Pig Island there are piggies galore, you know that there must be a million or more. They sing piggy songs as loud as they please, and wiggle to sleep in the coconut trees …”

Then I had enough of that, and drew slightly stormier seas … Below, as projected on the huge empty wall behind our block.

This wall was what originally inspired us to make this performance. It used to have a nice, decrepit old advertisement for coal briquets, but now that it’s been fixed up and insulated, it’s all white and boring and literally screaming for projections.

Anyway, in the stormy seas, which Ilan was heaving quite convincingly, I drew a ship, and a flying piggy …

(Still image from video shot by Hermano Silva.)

Then I drew some kind of seal, and then pink tentacles, with which Ilan pulled down the ship into the abyss.

Then he kept the piggy around, and I drew a winged skull and a wolf howling at it, while Ilan rotated the skull and the piggy in the nightly sky, to which I then added stars.

(Still image from video shot by Hermano Silva.)

Then, if I remember it right, I drew a landscape around the wolf, which turned into the surface of a lake, with water lilies and a massive and very disturbing toad (which later received positive feedback from the audience). Then for some reason Ilan put the wolf upside down under the surface of the water, so I drew the fabled city Kitezh likewise upside down under the water. Meanwhile Ilan twirled it all around in some magical way.

(Still image from video shot by Ilan.)

At some point we started to see lightning in the distance, so we ended the show with rotating little planets with houses and trees on them and a sleepy piggy saying good night. I hauled the big projector off the roof like ten minutes before it started to rain. Whee, perfect timing!

The artists:

Ilan (still image from video shot by me) …

… and Tinet. (Still image from video shot by Ilan.)

Big thanks obviously to Dida, to the very nice manager of our favourite restaurant Donath across the street, who let us store the huge projector in their kitchen over the day and then came over with his little labrador puppy, to iink who built the Tagtool box, to Maki who helped us with our n00bish technical problems, to Henne from Beamaround who hooked us up with such great and inexpensive projectors, and not least to all the people who dropped by to see our pigtures.

A wee wild piggy stumbles upon a strange object in the forest. Find out what happens next!

Event details on Facebook …

Click the picture to go read.

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39 down, 48 to go. V`(oo)´V
Even though my pace appears to have slowed down, I have two shorter comics which are in the “incoming” pipe right now and will supposedly be drawn before the summer is over. And there is always the 24 hour comic day that will save the day no matter what. So I probably won’t have any trouble drawing all the 87 pages I pledged, and then some.

So we took the train to Leipzig yesterday to go see The Last Match at last. But the bookstore/gallery MZIN had closed early, maybe because the attendants wanted to see the football game. :o( Probably they don’t get a lot of visitors anyway.

All the little drawings!

Our plan B was to explore an abandoned printing house in central Leipzig. Doing it during the Germany vs. Argentina game was really perfect timing …

Some nice Stalinist Classicist buildings on Mühlenstraße.

Other abandoned industrial buildings.

Two lobstrosities guard the entrance to the abandoned printing house. Ilan claimed he couldn’t fit himself through the windows in the front door, so we looked for another entrance, and found one.

Peeling ceilings and empty halls.

More photos on my Flickr and Ilan’s Flickr!

Here is Ilan’s little report, too.

Textiles, prints and handmade books by Eija Elmgren, ceramics and textiles by Annika Gustafsson, silver jewellery by Sanna Falk-Nilsson, ironwork by Lasse Nilsson, paintings by Marianne Nordal. All in the very lovely location of this little old house.

“Thor’s hammer” pendants, wrought iron, by Lasse Nilsson

Comics zines in the window! Not handmade per se, but printed mass products. Although some of mine have hand-stitched spines. :op

Photos by Eija Elmgren.

All the exhibition info