A report from ComicInvasionBerlin in its 5th anniversary

If there’s anything empowering about comics is that you can just grab a pen and a piece of paper to express yourself. You can also join others like you and form gatherings of people with common interests, developing a community that will probably continue to grow. That’s the case of most indie comic festivals, communities that attract audiences that will sometimes turn into creators and vice versa.

CIB was once a street mini comics festival, but after five years, it has grown into a two- week event that’s visited by about 7000 people, and has important visitors while focusing on a central topic each year. While most of the activities and published books are in German, CIB can be considered a local festival that welcomes international visitors and debates.

The activities are more or less the same that can be found in any book fair: presentations, panel discussions, contests, exhibitions, gatherings, book signings, drawing battles, workshops, concerts… But what’s particular about indie comics is the ease with which it addresses certain causes, and the sense that anyone can join the debate, regardless of credentials.

This year’s central topic is the refugee crisis, represented in the activities but most significantly, in the work of some of the artists. For instance, the official poster was designed by Ali Fitzgerald (http://www.alifitzgerald.net/), an US artist currently based in Berlin, who administers a comics workshop for refugees. The poster shows what seems to be a migrant whose possessions are being eaten by sharks and crocodiles, while she barely escapes the jaws of the animals, in a clear allusion to the path of the Syrian and Iraqi refugees across the ocean.

Art as a form of inclusion and expression of refugees into their new surroundings is driven by many workshops established in shelters across Berlin. It even has a phrase: “Drawing as Voice”. Indeed, drawing as a form of basic expression allows not only the refugees to express what the limits of language cannot, but also it invites their readers to understand and share their sense of misplacement and trauma, and hopefully, to get over the recurrent prejudice enforced by some politicians and the media.

The CIB gives space to individual authors but is currently promoting the work of collectives, and these are some of the most interesting comics seen during the festival’s main activities and its satellite program:

Swiss artist Alex Baladi’s personal stories (https://alexbaladi.wordpress.com/) are associated with the Comix 2000 book that was translated in the U.S. by Fantagraphics. Baladi, like the dozens of authors published in Comix 2000, tested the possibilities of wordless images. This bande dessinée author has over 20 publications and has been active since the early 1990s. His exhibition at the Supalife gallery was a collection of wordless comics, or simple illustrations (with no distinguishable narrative) about the extraordinary in the mundane, such as his piece of clothes hanging in a remote island.

Brazilian Augusto Paim’s (http://www.cartoonmovement.com/p/5845/comics) comic journalism follows the trend established by Joe Sacco. With “So close, faraway!”, presented at Renate Comics, he focuses on the crisis of the homeless in Brazil.

Collective “Drawing the line – Dissenting voices in contemporary comics” (http://www.neurotitan.de/Galerie/Archiv/2016/160409_Drawing%20The%20Line.html) honors its name and their exhibition at Neurotitan gallery showed the works of Rebecca Rosen (http://cargocollective.com/rebeccarosen/MAIDENHEADLOCK), Akvile Magicdust (http://www.akvilemagicdust.com/), Paula Bulling (http://paulabulling.net/), Radical Jetset, Marlene Krause (http://marlenekrause.blogspot.com), Tine Fetz (http://www.tinefetz.net/), Max Beitinger and Barrack Lima. These artists confronted a series of questions, such as their work responding to the rise of the new extreme right in Europe, the diversity of the comic scene and comics in the market of capitalist society.

Paula Bulling’s work about the Syrian refugees on a camp, called “Lesvos, November 2015” depicts the horrific experience of displaced families and the undignified conditions of how they’re treated. Barrack Rima is a Lebanese comic artist whose stories from home have an expressionism quality to emphasize the hostility of the local authorities. Written in Arabic and French, his comics are also made of collages.

Max Batinger in a German drawer whose work is mostly abstract images without text. His line of work is similar of Canadian Marc Bell with detailed his compositions. Tine Fetz is one of the most interesting artists of this collective. Born in Germany, she combines hand-drawn and digital illustrations to portray social subjects as well as personal stories that will immediately remind you of the Hernandez brothers in their Love & Rockets period.

LGBT topics were represented by the Superqueeroes, a collective-exhibition that is appropriating the massively popular genre of superheroes. Superqueeroes is about heroes and heroines observed in already existent mainstream comics, such as X-Men and characters like Catwomen, and also created on the basis of ordinary people’s lives and their acts of struggle and resistance in a hetero-normative world.

The exhibition presents work by well-known LGBT artists such as Tom of Finland, Alison Bechdel, Ralf König, Wolfgang Müller, as well as newcomers Megan Rose Gedris (http://rosalarian.com/), Erika Moen (http://www.erikamoen.com/), Elizabeth Beier (http://www.elizabethdrewyou.com/new-blog/), Theo Van Den Boogaard (http://www.theovandenboogaard.nl/), Simon Bosch (http://simonbosch.de/), Jennifer Camper with her Hernandez Bros. style (http://www.jennifercamper.com/home/) and Kylie Summer Wu (http://transgirlnextdoor.tumblr.com/), among many others. These new artists will often portray known LBGT artists as heroes and heroines. While not necessarily LGBT themselves, some of the artists contribute to the exhibition in solidarity.

But it is perhaps the collective action of people’s drawing what results the most satisfying, specially for those not used to any means of expression. Children and adults get together in the early stages of the Berlin spring, draw cardboard murals and create scale models with the most diverse of subjects in what is already one of the most significant areas of Berlin: the Haus Schwarzenberg (https://www.circus-berlin.de/fabisch-history/), which, like most parts of the city, still reminds of the horrors of the war and the at the same time, the efforts to rebuild the city, a task in which art and culture are the fundamental pillars.

For more information and photos, go to: http://www.comicinvasionberlin.de/ 

Archived version: 

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628162139/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/a-report-from-comicinvasionberlin-in-its-5th/5714097dacd0d05dbc9aa043

https://www.bookwitty.com/text/a-report-from-comicinvasionberlin-in-its-5th/5714097dacd0d05dbc9aa043

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Sarah Lund, noir ruler. A commentary of the three seasons of Danish TV series Forbrydelsen.

(May contain spoilers)

Nordic noir has reinvented the crime and police genre, creating cultural products that have proved to be massively successful in Europe through official partnerships, and not so official broadcasting channels where some series have acquired a cult following of fans from all over the world.

Such is the case of Danish TV series Forbrydelsen, already a hit home when it became famous in the United Kingdom, Germany and The Netherlands in part for its vertiginous narrative, but mostly because of its main star, Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lund, a peculiar woman of many complexities, played by the very talented Sofie Grabol, previously known in art cinema circles for her work with the likes of Lars von Trier and the Dogma manifesto.

Grabol’s acting has given depth to a character that is at once hesitant but resolute, strong, not necessarily “feminine” or in possession of psychological attributes and behaviors associated with the female gender. For instance, she’s detached and her lack of communicative skills isolates her from personal and professional surroundings. Her motivations aren’t always easy to read and the sometimes flawed decisions in her personal relationships turn her into a three dimensional character full of dilemmas, contradictions, mistakes and difficult decisions in a field where men make the rules.

Sarah Lund became a female hero since the introductory pilot, where her professional vacillations quickly collided against her firmness to solve the murder of a teenage girl named Nanna Birk Larsen. The episode plays, almost until the end, with the notion of an insecure professional who also has personal issues with her boyfriend, son and mother, and who can’t make up her mind and decide what her priorities are. Messy with her blue jeans, a cardigan, a ponytail and no make-up, she’s not the typical female TV lead, but Lund fulfills the principle of verisimilitude by going against the representation of female detectives who chase criminals in high heels and look like tall, skinny super models, so typical in many American crime shows.

Sarah simply looked and acted familiar, and it was easy to sympathize with her. But she was also intriguing. She’d choose a dangerous path, following her intuition, as the spectator knew something bad was about to happen. The closing scene of episode 1, when she grabs her bag and gets off the plane to go back to her Danish office, quitting her transfer to the Swedish police, interrupts a series of long edits and sets a fast narrative for the upcoming episodes, where Sarah sets the rhythm. The case of Nanna Birk Larsen will develop for the whole season, and in another defiance of the genre’s clichés, the individual story will soon signify the slow disintegration of her immediate circle and all the way to the circuit of politics, where corruption and double standards will mirror the individual tragedy.

“The personal is political”, or so seems to be the show’s stand, going against a trend of storytelling that detaches the individual crime from society. Forbrydelsen shows us that a single crime hurts society as a whole, but it’s also a product of it. Sarah is assigned to the case with her partner, detective Jan Meyer. Following leads that go all the way to the Prime Minister and back, both Lund and Meyer get to unravel the identity of the killer, at the expense of risking everything. Tragedy strikes again and, despite having solved the murder, Lund, now investigated by her bosses, is punished and degraded to a traffic officer in the first episode of Season 2.

The murder of Nanna Birk Larsen seems to have been written following what statistics show all over the world: that the perpetrator is in most cases someone close to the victim. It took Sarah many false leads, a loss of her own and the political elite upside down to finally catch the killer, his own pathology rooted in a broken family and childhood.

By the second season, the production of episodes was reduced by half, and Sarah, now investigating a series of gruesome murders by an apparent serial killer, goes through her worst personal decisions, almost to the point of auto-sabotage, and getting killed by them. A weak season by comparison, Sarah’s personal struggles and blindness at love are the focus of the storyline, with a villain too wicked and too hard to believe. A point in favor is the commentary on international politics, in particular Denmark’s participation in the war against Afghanistan is portrayed as a foolish decision that resulted in the senseless murder of Afghan civilians and the fractured minds of the soldiers upon their return.

But it is the third and last season that remains the most controversial. The young daughter of a prominent industrialist is kidnapped by a man hungry for vengeance. The story focuses on the bitter battle of her parents against each other as they’re desperate to find her, and the plan of the kidnapper reveals a horrific case of pedophilia in the hands of an apparently respectable man. Such tragedy is framed by a wider political context, just like the previous seasons, as the 3rd ends with Sarah facing the limits of justice and reason. What to do when you’re facing a monster, knowing he will get away with a crime?

Intertwined with her own personal demons, her fractured relationship with her son and a second opportunity at love, Forbrydelsen’s finale poses many moral dilemmas in an open ending that manages to portray Sarah with all her contradictions. She’s a hero and an antihero at the same time. The last five minutes of the episode have no dialogue, but the resolution comes from the story that Grabol’s face is expressing as she’s staring at the killer, who stares back in those harrowing, empty eyes. Perhaps one of the best acting moments of Sophie Grabol and an unexpected but satisfying end to one of the best female characters of crime TV.

Archived version: 

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628162132/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/sarah-lund-noir-ruler-a-commentary-of-the-three/570361d3acd0d0166b56a76a

https://www.bookwitty.com/text/sarah-lund-noir-ruler-a-commentary-of-the-three/570361d3acd0d0166b56a76a