tommi musturi

Thanks to Max and the people of La Casa Encendida I visited Avantcomic in Madrid. What a nice event! Well organized, focused, laid-back and meaningful! The four close to 2-hours interviews that made the main programme we’re well prepared, dag deep and surprised. This made me think why we don’t have anything like this in Finland. The local events are filled with mixed programme that’s too much for everyone to make the content of the event be something more than its parts. It’d be time to focus and simplify, to actually PLAN it all as a wholesome. In order we really want to tell and teach something about comics in general.

After Madrid I went to Berlin for a short trip to Jahaa! -exhibition opening. That’s a Scandinavian group exhibition with plenty of artists and I think it’s there in Felleshus until end of 2009. So, go and see if you’re around. Meanwhile you can watch Emelie, Bjarni and me speaking dubbed German HERE.

And just for your information: I finally updated the publications -section here that I noticed missed the last four releases.

PS. That’s Christian (Gasser) with Edmond (Baudoin) in the photo.

Finally: Samuel’s own book is out. The Finnish edition arrived to me yesterday while Swedish, French and Portuguese editions should be also out there already. We’ll be releasing the Finnish version upcoming weekend at The Helsinki 24. Comics Festival. There’s a short interview on the stage about it and the rest I’ve done lately on Saturday at 4.30 pm. And like usually, Huuda Huuda and Kutikuti are present at the festival. KK djs me along will play at the festival disco and sunday club while HH puts out new books from Joann Sfar, Roope Eronen, Aapo Rapi and Michelangelo Setola. That’s all excellent stuff. Roope’s and Aapo’s book have English translation. These are all available from Huuda Huuda and Kutikuti websites. But anyway: Helsinki festival is always lots of fun so welcome!

Besides Samuel I also got a package from Singapore with brand new book called Go Home. That’s an anthology collecting 6 ppl from Asia and 6 from Europe all telling a story on theme ‘Home’. Samuel’s there also. And that’s not all: brand new Kuti was just released. Phew.

I’m glad I can say this: the book of Samuel is finally ready and being printed. It took +3 years to finish. I’ve been pushing it all into book form slowly and spent last spring and this summer to finish it all. Lots of work it was but now I can say I did my best. In the end it’s 140 pages in four colour with hardcovers.

The book will come out from the printers in September and will be released as four editions during autumn. Finnish edition will be out until The Helsinki 24. Comics Festival from my own label Huuda Huuda and Swedish edition until The Gothenburg Book Fair from Optimal Press. French and Portuguese editions will follow from La 5e Couche and Chili Com Carne. Feels kind of weird getting this book out in four countries at the same time.

While I’m waiting for the book from the printers, I could actually explain a bit about the way Samuel is done. That’s where you should look at the image above…

I started to work on Samuel like half a year before it ended up in comics. He was someone that appeared in my sketchbooks every now and then. With Samuel my aim was to create a VERY simple character and try to express emotions with it without words, without expressions. So, it’s mostly body language. Anyway, few months later I went to Benin in Africa and continued working with it. Meanwhile, the sea and creatures there fascinated me and I filled one sketchbooks with all the organic and mathematic forms. These drawings became later the surroundings for Samuel’s comics. In the end this specific “style” of doing it took few months to develop. I didn’t intend to create something like that but mainly played inside my sketchooks and noticed that “I’ve got this character that started to live and one book full of drawings that look like the world he lives in” … and that’s where I decided I’d try him on a short story. So, I did that, did another episode and after a while he became a very close friend that I can tell stories to.

But, I was supposed to write something about the way it’s drawn. So, first of all, the method is just DAMN SLOW and if I could choose now, I’d do it all differently. First I draw this thin mathematic line drawing, which is very focused work – takes patience and makes me sweat. Being so mathematic, the line doesn’t leave you room to go wrong. Every mistake here is visible. After the line drawing is done I do what I call “the shadows”. That’s actually another line drawing that’s done on another paper and presents the shadows of the image. This phase is much easier already, BUT I have to be very concentrated with this also – this layer makes a lot of the atmosphere in the image – what’s in light, what’s in shadow – how much there’s light – is the light hard or soft, dead or alive and so on. One could say this could be done much easier, with a computer and so on… and that’s maybe true. Anyway, why I’m doing it like this is the fact that I cannot see the actual image developing on the paper – I mean: I want it to be like that. The image I’m creating is inside my head, it’s not concrete but fantasy. This leads often to surpising results. In a way this reminds of methods of doing colour layers for silkscreening – you will see the result only in the end when it’s printed. THAT’s the funny part.

Anyway, after the line drawing and the shadows are done, I scan them and colour the first line drawing in Photoshop. What comes to colours, their role in Samuel is important. As I wrote before about atmosphere of specific image, colours of course play an important role in that. The working title of Samuel in English is “Walking With Samuel”, where “walk” is a metaphor for thinking. That means the surroundings present different emotions and states of mind. One aim and focus with Samuel was to present the world as rich as possible. For two reasons: it’s a positive world and a possible – a world of details and possibilities, an ideal world that IS here but we’re blind for. On the other hand I was very aware of the fact that mute comic can easily become somehow boring, something that you just browse through. I want the images to be so rich and imaginative that they drag you inside them. I’m not sure if I succeeded with that but anyway.

After colouring the image I’m putting the shadows over it all and the final image is there. That’s sometimes scary but mostly delightful.

I wrote already too much so I’ll cut it all here. The image shown here is from the upcoming book and presents the four phases of the work.

There’s an exhibition of some of my recent drawings in the gallery of The Comics Center in Helsinki (3. linja 17). The gallery is open Tue-Fri from 11 to 19 and Sat from 10 to 16, exhibition lasts through whole July.

Just to mention it’s all works made with mixed techniques showing demons of today, one horny trio, mullet lost in lottery, the perfect family and the end of the world, some happy zombies, princess that’s too big, beggar without hands plus some kinetic images.

Welcome to opening that’s 3rd of July from 18 to 19.

I’ll be signing and talking about my new book Uni Toivosta – Kolmas Toivon kirja here:

Like-store (Iso Roba 20, Helsinki)
Wed 22.4. 5-7 pm.

Pitkämies (3. linja 17, Helsinki)
Thu 23.4 6-7 pm.

Uni Toivosta (The Dream of Hope) is the third book in the Books of Hope series. This time it’s an apocalyptic tale of a wild west hero named Jack. It’s also an image of a Finnish man, or something he dreams of. This book is actually about destruction. There is no such thing as hero. In real life people die.

English and French editions will come later this year. Stay tuned.

8BIT TODAY & DEATH TO MOST

Sander asked if I could answer to some questions concerning my small picture pamphlet Death to Most, particularly the pixel works in it. So, in this small interview we’re taking bit of a look back to 8bits on 80’s and how that’s related to my work these days. To whom this might not say anything, I’m quoting 8bit Today:

“8bit – is a generation of computers, mainly from the 80ties. These particular computers had strong limitations in every aspect; audio, graphics and speed of the processor were only a mere fraction of nowadays standards. Dealing with these limitations brought very authentic aesthetics.”

In other words: we were, are and will be nerds. God save the nerds.

PAPER KILLS TREES #2

The second issue of Paper Kills Trees. You can browse it all online. Takes a glance on diy-fanzine-artzine world. +30 artists, articles, interviews… lots of good people that have been pushing it together for a long time already. Kristen asked me to explain something about Boing Being and what I’m doing in general but I don’t quite remember anymore what I actually said. Apart from that this is good stuff, fresh and quality. After reading that, you should also keep your eye on Kristen’s blog.

For the past two months we (Tiina and I) have been working here on the west coast of Finland, by the frozen sea in a wooden house that comes with a bunch of mice living above us. It’s peaceful here and besides doing some ice fishing (that’s true! how art brut is that???) I finally got the 3rd Book of Hope finished.

The Finnish edition is now in printers and that’s another thing I feel reliefed with. One PAINFUL project that was but I’m happy with the result. To you how know the previous two books I can tell that this third part is one book long dream of the main character. The Dream of Hope is a wild west story about an outlaw name Jack. It’s quite apocalyptic actually. However, the book presents ‘an image of man’ – a hero that cannot die. That’s quite much a dilemma as you can imagine, in real life at least.

Finnish edition (Uni Toivosta) is out in April from Like. We’ll have a small release party for that in Helsinki. I’ll let you know. What comes to the other editions, the English one is hopefully out until MoCCA, published by Bries and the French one should come from La 5e Couche later this year or beginning of 2010.

From this on I’ll try to keep the pace of one book a year. There’ll be five in total so that means it’ll be all ready until spring 2011. That’s in the future. Eeek.

GlömpX is a book and an exhibition that we launched in the beginning of March. I’ve been curating, editing and organizing this thing for the whole 2008. It’s 10th issue of Glömp and also our +10-years anniversary project. It’s also the last Glömp I will edit. However, the publication might continue in some form but let’s see. We’ll first go through this exhibition tour of ca. 10 countries in Europe. That takes until end of 2010. I’m exhausted and it’s time to do something else for a while.

Glömp has always meant lot of work and it’s always been a great risk to publish. At the moment I feel somehow reliefed. There was a great urge to keep it fresh every issue – an anthology has to reform to obtain it’s goals. For me these goals are obvious. An anthology can publish material that is risky, authors that are new to the readers, works that experiment with the way of expression. It’s all still less of a risk than publishing an own book for these works. It’s sure we need to take risks to get this thing called “comics” somewhere. However, taking a risk and failing usually makes it all worse. With Glömp I had three goals: 1) to make Glömp a regular publication that serves as a platform comic experiments 2) to present new Finnish artists to the rest of the world 3) to present new foreign artists to the Finnish audience. These were of course the goals that defined the publication itself. This all is meaningless if there are no readers. Here we have another reason why an athology should be fresh – making it the same way over and over again means you’re actually defining your audience… that will most likely decrease issue after issue. There are lots of examples on this, Blab is one. That’s not interesting even for comic enthusiastics anymore, though the content would still have meaningful value.

Hey, I forgot to tell you about the project itself. It’s 168-page book in full colour, featuring 15 Finnish artists. Comes in hardcovers and with a soundtrack on a CD. As usually, there isn’t any theme in this (I hate themes, they just don’t work) BUT I gave a our artists a task to do a comic that’s in 3 dimensions. I’m not writing about just some 3-dimensional tricks but a totally new dimension in the narration of the comic. GlömpX is the result of this. For sure it’s an experiment but the result we got is interesting. Idea was not to invent something totally new (that was just a plus) but to use 3-dimensional narration effectively.

We have a small website on GlömpX that you can visit here. It explains the whole project from the scratch.

I’d gladly hear your comments on this.

There was a very good exhibition of today’s comics in Andrejsala, Riga. I did some works on Samuel for that. The doll is actually made by Sonja – big thanks! Btw, Samuel’s book is scheduled to be out this year. I’m very excited to get it finished. It’s an important book for me and now published all alone Samuel will hopefully dig bit deeper under the skins of the readers. Silent stories always suffer from being among ‘louder’ stories – they work on such levels and load meanings into nuances that among mixed anthologies these silent ones always suffer. The reader browses them through quickly, not spending the time needed to obtain the level of silent narration. So, I’m happy to see how Samuel will work all alone.

It seems that keeping this blog up to date is impossible for me. There’s just too much to do and to be honest, I never was a good blog reader myself. However, here’s something from the past months. Death to Most is a small colourful publication that includes my teenage drawings from 80’s and beginning of 90’s. You can find some samples from the Boing Being website.