Iceland Journal

Sketch by David Collier.

Hamilton-based cartoonist David Collier is the creator of the acclaimed Collier’s series and Just the Facts, both published by Drawn & Quarterly. Collier is attending the NINE Comics Festival exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. What follows are his written and sketched impressions of that trip.

Day 4

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?" the American woman in the room beneath us screamed up at me. Ok, so maybe jumping rope on the balcony at quarter to eight in the morning isn't the most considerate thing to do, but I really thought our hotel was solid enough to muffle the sound.

So it’s back to the little wood bench (by the sculpture Solfar) for me and my jump-rope habit. I had been avoiding the water, as the north breeze off the sea is really picking up, streaming by now at 80 km/h, and the spray from the waves is freezing all over the waterfront trail. But I'm a Canadian, from the country with the most coastline in the world, so Iceland is nothing I can't handle.

The jump rope works out even on the Icelandic coastline, lending credence to my theory that it is the most exportable form of exercise.

My diet is now fish, fish for every meal, and as they say at McDonald’s, I'm lovin’ it!

The lady from the suite below us I see at breakfast, a big bear of a woman who looks as all the American tourists in Iceland do: pissed off and annoyed. It seems to be a poor time to be from the U.S. in Scandinavia, and not only because all the Americans I've seen are so underdressed. Rather, people here are reacting to the political situation, with an alternative newspaper running an Onion-style mock front page with the headline “Iceland Supports War in Iraq.”

Inside, however, a declaration points out that it was only Iceland's prime minister voicing support, while according to polls, 84 per cent of the population opposes the invasion. Some of my best friends are Americans, so it’s with mixed feelings that I’m here as a Canadian artist benefiting from a U.S. backlash.

I'm here representing the kind of books published by Chris Oliveros in Montreal and his company Drawn & Quarterly, in the same way that the Swedish artists are here under the umbrella of the Goteborg-based Optimal Press. And yet, while Drawn & Quarterly as a company is taking on more and more of a U.S. flavour, publishing an increasing number of U.S.-based cartoonists, the organizers of this exhibit ended up inviting only the company's Canadian artists.

In fact, in the exhibition, I only see the work of one American cartoonist, Art Spiegelman, who in his latest book cries out that he is terrorized by both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Maybe the organizers of the festival didn't plan it this way and the absence of Americans is just an accident. I hope so — it wouldn't be right to lump individual American artists together like some kind of apartheid South African rugby team.

Boy, such headaches arise from this innocent pursuit of making comics.

The show itself is a delight. Yes, “the Icelandic Way" worked out and it is a sprawling, visual feast.

The Icelandic comics are inventive, with founding fathers of the republic given superhero powers in a series of paintings by Johann Traustason. But my favorite Icelandic comic I found in the latest issue of NEO magazine, in a piece by Kjartan Arnorsson, where the artist somehow manages to combine two Icelandic obsessions — trolls (little people, fairies, etc.) and erotica — and somehow makes it work!

Anneli Furmark is another good cartoonist here. Amatorernas afton is a collection of stories that for me capture the world and its sexual tensions. The lead story, "Natt i sittvagn," follows a young woman, her hair still in long blond braids, on a train ride as the Swedish countryside rolls by the windows. All the while, she is talked up by a much older man, a respectable-looking gentleman who reveals his true thoughts at the end of an extended monologue. She speaks in English to a young, good-looking man in the car she moves to.

"That man who sat next to me, he was… rude to me."

"I'll beat him up — just joking, you can go to sleep now."

But then she dreams of Young Good-Looking Man, who is sleeping in the seat next to her. She is kissing him, they are naked and she awakes embarrassed by her own lustful thoughts.

When Ms. Furmark’s work gets translated, the language you are reading will be richer.