Martin Kellerman: It's a Dog's Life in Sweden

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Dec. 6, 2005 Sign up now!

By Heidi MacDonald -- Publishers Weekly, 12/6/2005

Martin Kellerman has become the most popular young cartoonist in Sweden with his semi-autobiographical newspaper strip, Rocky, which shows that the problems of young slackers—lusting after your girlfriend's zaftig sister, losing your shoe at a hippie party, trying to survive a dead-end job at a porno magazine—can be internationally hilarious. An English collection of the strip, Rocky: The Big Payback has just been released by Fantagraphics, and Kellerman tells Comics Week how to keep your friends while using them as raw material.

What kind of comics scene is there in Scandinavia?

There's an alternative scene. We have some traditional comics that have been very popular for a long time, but they're old comics. I don't think a lot of kids today read them. They've become obsolete. Like Dagwood, about old married couples. I read that stuff when I was a kid and liked it. People of my generation usually do autobiographical stuff or arty stuff for a small audience. We have one big hit every 10 years or so, where an underground comic become a big seller. There have been three or four of those. I'm the latest one.

Were you influenced by American cartoonists?

That stuff is available but it doesn't have a big audience. Everybody who draws comics read American and Canadian cartoonists like Peter Bagge, Joe Matt and Robert Crumb. Everybody has grown up on that. I guess my influences are mixed. I was very influenced by them and by Swedish underground artists. One of them is published by Fantagraphics, Max Andersson [Pixy]. They're very dark comics. There are others that are very not available here. Also, when RAW came out, some of the Swedish cartoonists were in there.

I'm sort of a mixture between really dark comics and commercial stuff like MAD. That's why to [underground cartoonists] I'm considered a commercial artist.

Rocky appears in a daily newspaper. Obviously, in an American newspaper, you would not have topless girls and drinking and puking and swearing. Are things more permissive in Sweden, or was it edgy when it came out?

Every time we started in a new newspaper they'd get letters. Sometimes they'd throw the comic out because they were afraid they would lose subscribers. The people who like it don't write. But if they give it a chance, usually people like it. If it's a really good newspaper that has the best writers and photographers, [editors] don't care about the comics, they just don't want anybody to get offended.

I'm not trying to shock anybody. People do swear and people do get naked, and there's nothing really shocking about it. They're not devil worshippers, it's just ordinary people doing ordinary stuff. I'm telling the story in a format that's usually for kids and an easy laugh, and you're not supposed to relate to it very much.

Humor is notoriously hard to translate. Were there any situations that didn't translate?

I think not that much. The thing that gets lost is that in Swedish we take words from English and other languages. And all of that gets lost in the translation. Also when a Swede says something like Jay-Z would say, that's automatically funny. It's still white here, but in Sweden, it's funnier. Most of my friends have grown up on hip-hop, but it's like a joke—we're so not gangsta.

There's also a Rocky magazine?

My friends and I started publishing one with [Egmont]. It's like an ordinary magazine, but my comics are in there and I do an interview with an artist [among them hip-hop artists like 50 Cent, M.I.A., The Game] and I draw it like a cartoon.

Do you find the grind of a daily strip difficult?

No, it's actually kind of nice. My agent handles the business side, all I have to do is sit down and draw. In the beginning I had to do everything myself. Now it's more like being a kid sitting around watching TV and drawing all the time.

Have you found it's hard on your friends that you're doing this very honest material based on them?

Sometimes I can be like a parasite and live off them a little bit. They generate a lot of the material. I try to work around it and wait for a while if it's delicate stuff, if someone breaks up or does something stupid. They're patient with me. My friends are just such perfect cartoon characters. A lot of times they say things and all I have to do is write it down. Their personalities match and complement each other so well, it's impossible not to write it down. If I wait a while, even the upsetting stuff they can still laugh about.

Did anyone ever get really mad at you?

Yeah. [laughs] But then I can draw a strip about them getting mad and me feeling bad. I can communicate and apologize through the comic as well.

PWCW:Do you ever worry about revealing too much about yourself?

No. Before I did this, I would sort of worry. But when I did the first ones, it was a leap. Once you do it, it's a relief. Sometime it's a nice feeling to take a giant crap on yourself. [laughs.]