Bemærk: Dette websted opdateres ikke.
Det ophørte officielt ved indgangen til 2013.
Derfor vil en række links være døde
Men nu ligger det her som et historisk
dokument, hvor en stor del af indholdet
stadig har relevans.
 

mærkværdig vis vej gennem skyskraberskoven ned til den korte landingsbane, som er bygget ud i havnen. Det må betragtes som et mirakel, at Hong Kong Air Port har undgået alle flyulykker, men det virker umiddelbart forståeligt, at en ny lufthavn er under opførsel.
Jeg vender tilbage til paneldeltagerne, som er ved at falde til ro på deres pladser. Blot mangler endnu franske Moebius og Martin Berthommier samt portugisiske Luis Louro. Da de først ankommer til Hong Kong den følgende uge, er der nu intet der hindrer mig i at stille spørgsmålet:

Are comics trash?

Intiativet til Eurocomics '98 kommer fra "The European Working Group for Culture" - sammensat af repræsentanter fra de Europæiske konsulater og kulturelle institutioner i Hong Kong - som har samarbejdet med Provosional Urban County og Hong Kong Arts Festival Society om arrangementets gennemførelse.

Midt i billedet Etta Ohlsen flankeret af
David Lloyd (tv) og artiklens forfatter
halvt skjult bag Ole Comoll Christensen (th).

En af hovedattraktionerne, Ole Comoll Christensen,
i arbejde foran et stort, interesseret publikum

På skift tog tegnerne en tørn ved fire tegneborde - opstillet i festivalsalen med udsigt over Hong Kong Harbour.

Er tegneserier så det rene bras?

Med et kort tilbageblik til 50ernes hetz konstaterer panelet, at den diskussion er passé i Europa, og kaster sig så ud i en meget mere konstruktiv diskussion om, hvad tegneserier egentlig er. Fra David Lloyd, hvis erfaringer og frustrationer stammer fra et engelsktalende marked med USA-dominans, til Olle Berg, der giver udtryk for, at enhver læser af "Spiderman" og lignende superheltebras ikke fatter, hvad rigtige tegneserier handler om.
Lloyd - kendt som tegner af "V for Vendetta" - brokker sig over, at superheltene dominerer det britiske marked og angriber forlæggerne for at ignorere tegneserier med mere modent indhold og af højere kvalitet. Selv om England har frembragt en hel del ekstraordinære tegneserieskabere, nyder tegneserier tilsyneladende større anerkendelse i de andre lande, som er repræsenteret ved "Eurocomics '98".
Også tilhørerne begynder at stille spørgsmål.
Et par unge kvinder - imod sædvane fortæller arrangørerne bagafter - lægger for et øjeblik deres kinesiske tilbageholdenhed til side og viser med deres spørgsmål, at de ikke er ganske ukendte med europæiske tegneserier og godt ville have mulighed for at købe dem i Hong Kong.
En britisk, kvindelig journalist stiller i stakkevis af spørgsmål. Senere afslører hun med en festival-artiklen "Cartoon Culture", over 2 farvestrålende helsider, at hun hedder Victotia Finlay og repræsenterer "South China Morning Post".
Her kunne man indtil for få år siden læse

Zunzi

Craig Au Yeung

Li Chi Tak

Olle Berg

Robert Van der Kroft

 
Jesse Van Muylwick
 

David Lloyd

Jan Bosschært

Ronald Putzker

Chris Scheuer

Hansi Kiefersauer

Kati Kovàcs

Ole Comoll Christensen

Harald Havas

Censur!

Den serie beskæftiger panelet sig dog ikke med.  

Postkortmotiv af Ronald Putzger

Knapt er vi færdige med sorteringen før klapsalver indikerer, at hollandske Jesse van Muylwijck har lagt sidste hånd på endnu en af de karikaturer, han beredvilligt tegner af festivalens gæster. Han har konstant et stort publikum omkring sig, når han er tilstede i udstillingshallen, for rygtet om hans evner på dette område har bredt sig.
Han dyrker karikaturtegningen, fordi det giver ham smør på brødet. De øvrige fornødenheder får han betalt via honoraret for dagstrippen "The Dutch" - en hollandsk pendant til "Statsministeren".

Og så fortæller han i øvrigt med begejstring om, hvordan man i Groningen har stiftet en støtteforening til oprettelsen af et Hollandsk tegneseriemuseum. Projektet, som hollandske tegneserieskabere har givet ideer til i bogen "Gebouwd in Verbeelding", skal realiseres udfra arkitekten og tegneserieskaberen Francois Schuitens skitser. Det vil koste 12 millioner hollandske gylden at realisere. Indtil videre er der skaffet 7 millioner.
Det gav en dansk tegneseriemuseumsmand noget at tænke over!

Bagefter diskuter det europæiske selskab situationen i Kina, Peking og Hong Kong med Zunzi - en af Hong Kongs førende politisk-satiriske tegnere - over en Tsingtao pilsner (eller to) i The Foreign Correspondent's Club.
Zunzi har en skarp pen, og man kunne frygte, at han efter sammenlægningen ville få det svært med de nye magthavere. Men Zunzi siger, han føler sig rimeligt tryg, men indrømmer dog, at han og hans kolleger af og til spøger med spørgsmålet: hvem kommer først i fængsel?
I modsætning til "Lily Wong"'s far, Larry Feign, har Zunzi forrygende travlt. Han forsyner tre Hong Kong aviser med fem daglige cartoons, og hans arbejde er indtil videre samlet i syv bøger, hvoraf den ene handler om Tiananmen-massakren.

Denne Zunzi-illustration fra 1995
bærer titlen Dialogue er en
kommentar til Kinas overtagelse
af Hong Kong.

De fleste tegneserieskabere i Hong Kong tegner
i japansk mangastil. Følgelig er gadernes mange
blad- og avisudsalg præget af hæfter som disse.

Li Chi Tak tegner også serier
i manga-stil, men det vidner hans
"Little Strawberry" ikke om

Craig Au-Yeung er repræsentant for
Hong Kongs alternative tegneserieskabere,
som både i stil og indhold har fjernet sig
længst muligt fra manga.

Vi ankom til Hong Kong onsdag den 11. og allerede mandag den 16. februar måtte vi igen tage flyet retur til København via Paris.
Som så mange af de tidligere dage hænger tågen også denne hjemrejse-mandag lavt over og mellem Hong Kongs reflekterende højhusfacader. Netop ankommet fra Macau priser portugisiske Luis Louro solen i sit hjemland. Men han fortæller også, hvor svært portugisiske tegneserieskabere har det i dag. Selv har han fået udgivet flere eminent

Luis Louro i snak med Jesse van
Muylwijck og Jan Bosschært.

EUROCOMICS '98 in Hong Kong (February 13 to March 1) and Macau (March 6 to 20) was
attended by Ole Comoll Christensen, one of 12 European comic artists invited to the expo.

The month is Feburary; the scene is a comic exposition in the old City Hall, a low water front building. In the expo hall one huge glass wall offers a splendid view of Victoria harbour and beyond it: Kowloon peninsula. There's heavy traffic on the water: Ferries shuttling to and fro from the nearby Central District ferry pier to Kowloon dodge big container ships and Chinese junks passing through the harbour. Every few minutes airplanes dive behind the Kowloon skyline, somehow finding their way through a forest of towering buildings and somehow managing to land on the short runway built into the harbour. It seems a miracle that crashes have never happened here and the building of a new airport sounds like a very good idea.
There's fog over Hong Kong and Portugese comic artist Luis Luoro praises the sun of his home country. He has just arrived from Macau and we have a talk about the difficulties of comic artists in Portugal, where publishers nowadays prefer to print foreign (and cheaper) material. The story sounds familiar. Luoro is not quite unsuccesful, though, and gives me a copy of one of his many graphic novels, "Coracao", the eigth book in it's series. I don't understand much of the portugese, but I can enjoy the beautiful colouring and spacious layout.
Eurocomics '98 is conceived and put together by "The European Working Group for Culture", an organisation of people from various European consulates and cultural institutions in Hong Kong in collaboration with the local European Commision office, the Provisional Urban Council and the Hong Kong Arts Festival Society. Head of the project is Beatriz Brasil fom Portugal. The exposition is shown in a large room on the second floor of the "old" City Hall. The building looks in perfect shape, but in Central Hong Kong anything lower than thirty stories is definitely old and will probably soon be torn down and replaced with a new sky scraper. The rubbles will then be put in the harbour to provide foundation for new constructions.
The expo is based on the Angoulême creation "European Comics, Another Image" that toured the U.S. in 1996 and 1997. Also, about twenty different European animation films are shown on tv monitors, but the main attraction for the visitors must surely be the working artists: The fifteen of us, twelve Europeans and three Hong Kong Chinese, take turns to sit at the four drawing tables supplied by a furniture sponsor. The resulting drawings are hung on wires suspended over the workshop area. Harald Havas (chief editor of Austrian Comic Forum) and Anders Hjorth- Jorgensen (founder of the Danish Comic Museum) generally abstain from being artistic and take care of PR and showing visitors around.
Just before the opening there is hectic activity in the reading room: Fearing the hong Kong authorities that are said to be strict on the matter, hundreds of comics are quickly scanned for full frontal nudity and sexual acts. My conscience bids me to put my own graphic novel before inquisitional scrutiny: Yes, the sex scenes (various positions) are too much for Hong Kong kids; the book is put in the censored pile. While sad to see my work put away like this I do sympathize with the idea of protecting minors. But noting the popular manga violence sold to young and old alike at the newsstands I get mixed feelings about the issue.
Ronald Putzker (Vienna) has all his comics removed from the reading room. Putzker obviously takes great pleasure in drawing beautiful females and one of his favourite jobs is designing and drawing invitation cards for fetish parties. These parties are popular, too, in Hong Kong it seems, judging from a local event magazine. I'm happy to realize that not all the attending comic artists are full scale comic professionals. Like myself, Putzker hasn't yet reached the point where he can live solely from doing comics. We are both trying to find the right balance between doing commercial work and finding time to do what we really want, but which is less profitable: comics.
All of Kati Kovacs' comics are censored away, too. Where Putzker's style of drawing can be described as aesthetical realism, Kovacs goes more for the grotesque. Sex is a common subject in her stories and they are often based on personal experiences, she claims. They have sofar been published in alternative comic magazines in Scandinavia, Italy and France. Blonde Kovacs certainly looks Finnish, but her English and her lively gestures belies the many years she has lived near Rome, Italy.
David Lloyd, on the other hand, is a true professional having lived from his comics for many years. He is probably best known for drawing "V for Vendetta". During an open forum discussion "Are comics trash?" Lloyd mourns the super hero dominated British market and attacks the publishers for ignoring comics of more mature content and higher quality. Though England has produced quite a few extraordinary comic writers and artists, comics generally seem to be more respected in the other countries represented at "Eurocomics '98".
Lloyd lives in Sussex, a part of England where comic artists seem to concentrate. I don't know why. Maybe the artistic mind is stimulated by the seaside air, maybe it's the nearness to France, comic nation par excellence.
The French guests, Jean Giraud and Martin Berthommier have not arrived by the time I leave Hong Kong. Too bad. It would have been a great opportunity to meet Giraud who has been a major source of joy and inspiration for me personally. Sharing a drawing table with Giraud like I did with Putzker and Kovacs remains a dream.
Applause indicates that Dutch Jesse van Muylwijck has finished one more of his large caricatures. When he's here in the expo hall there's always a crowd around his drawing table and a demand on the rest of us from to do portraits. On the few instances where I oblige to the Chinese visitors I'm reminded that caricature drawing is a very difficult artform and I quickly revert to doing my own characters. Muylwijck has been succesful with his caricatures even at Montmartre, Paris, where competition is hard. He ascribes it to better language abilities than his French competitors. Muylwijk also does "The Judge", a strip for a Dutch newspaper. He lives near Groningen, where the first Dutch comic museum should open in a few years.
Rotterdam, at the other end of Holland, is home town for Robert van der Kroft, ligne clair-artist and editor of the fine Dutch bi-monthly magazine "Zone 5300"; a mix of music reviews, film articles and alternative comics from all over the world. "Zone" is not yet a golden egg and Kroft lives from "Sjors & Sjimmie" (of which there now is 39 albums) and his own "Claire" in a similar style. Where Kovacs climbs mountains in her spare time, van der Kroft plays guitar in a band called "Zorro". As both a mainstream artist and alternative publisher, van der Kroft somehow links (*) the assembled artists.
Having published comics by both of us, "Zone 5300" also forms a link between me and the fourth Scandinavian Olle Berg. His "cubistic ligne clair" comics are well known to me from Danish magazine "Fahrenheit". His style has always seemed very modern to me, so I'm surprised to see that he's a bit older than myself.
Where Berg is co-founder of the Swedish magazine "Galago", Johann Kiefersauer, is co-founder of German magazines "Zomix" and "Rad ab!". Kiefersauer lives in Berlin, where he draws newspaper strips and children's comics. The drawings he makes at the expo are reminiscent of classical American underground. He claims that he met us Danes at the Erlangen comics festival in 1992. His memory seems to be better than mine.
Over a Tsingtao beer (or two) at the Foreign Correspondent's Club, we discuss the situation in China, Peking and Hong Kong with Zunzi, a leading political cartoonist in Hong Kong. Seeing the sharpness of Zunzi's pen I express fear that now, after the hand-over, he must be in danger from the new rulers. Zunzi says that he feels quite confident, but admits that when he meets with other Hong Kong dissidents they sometimes jokingly ask themselves: Who will be the first in jail? Unlike Lily Wong's father, Larry Feign, Zunzi is still quite busy, though, and is often forced to leave the company of merry European artists to do his duty, supplying three Hong Kong papers with five (!) daily cartoons. His work has been collected in seven books, one of these dealing with the Tiananmen massacre. That this event is mentioned in these very terms in the exposition catalogue I take as a sign of a relatively lax censorship from the Chinese authorities.
Half a year under Peking has led to few changes in Hong Kong, and the Asian economical crisis seems to be feared more than the harsh communist repression foreseen by pessimists. Next to the City Hall that houses the exposition is now the Red Army headquarters. Ironically, the facade still reads "The Prince of Wales Building". Some say that these letters, chiseled into granite, can't be removed. One would think that Mao's army would have tried ...
Zunzi, who's been trying to organize local cartoonists and comic artists, estimates that the trade comprizes around 500 people in Hong Kong, most of them drawing manga style comics. I'm impressed with the number and wonder why we only meet a handful of local artists at the exposition. Probably, like all Hong Kong Chinese they're too busy working. Zunzi reminds me that although the number is impressive, most of these comic artists are young "assembly line" assistants."These youngsters work like a low-cost garment factory worker sewing cheap clothings for export, but in their mind, they dream that one day he can become one of the chief artists he has been admiring and is currently working for. And as a matter of fact, most of the chief artists, who are now "rich and famous", were assistants of the others before they climbed to the top of the pyramid", Zunzi explains. Next time I come to Hong Kong he'll show me a "manga factory".
At the newsstands I look for the typical Hong Kong produced comic. There's quite a selection, but I only find Japanese manga. In "HK Magazine" I do find a comic by Craig Au-Yeung, who represents Hong Kong alternative comics at the expo. In his essay in the expo catalogue Craig writes about the abundance of comics in Hong Kong and the failure to take them seriously. His own work is not published locally, but by Taiwan companies. I'm quite impressed with Craig's drawings and I'm happy to find out that some of his books are on their way in the mail.
Also present at the expo are Li Chi Tak and Jan Bosschaert.
I'm told that in Macau the exhibition has 200 visitors daily. There's no official number for Hong Kong, but with a population of more than ten times that of Macau, a total estimate could be around 30.000 visitors. However, I doubt that it's that much.