Allan Haverholm

I would welcome you to the new site, but the work in progress has been live on a subdirectory for weeks already, and indexed by search engines, no less! If this has gone over your head, welcome anyway.

A couple of weeks and quite a few days ago, on the makeshift blog, I foolhardily promised to have the site up and running by friday, May 9th … let’s not get too much into the nitty, bitty details about how long past that date is. The site isn’t done yet, but most of the content I wanted to showcase is here. There will be some fiddling after the fact, and lots of explanatory copy to type up, but all the more reason for you to check back as often as possible :p

Oh, and do leave a comment before you leave! Make some noise, as they say at rock shows; let me know I’m not publishing into thin air. And, just in case the comments system crashes and burns, you can get in touch via the Contact page.

I think that was about it. I’ll be back in 10 minutes when the first bug reports come rushing in.

The site is nearing completion, and I’m actually finding time off here and there to get some drawing done. Well, that is, if my publisher didn’t push small jobs my way, like helping Peter Snejbjerg’s debut Hypernauten see reprint. I’ve been obstructing their work on the 2nd edition for weeks, so Torben must have figured the only way to get me out of their hair was to let me in on the project.

My job has been setting up files for print, as well as giving the odd advice or pointed hint concerning the books look. A major pleasure was schooling Peter on cover composition. Everybody should have the chance once in their life to deprecate the people they looked up to iin their youth. In the end, both Peter’s and my ideas for cover images were scrapped, but he drew a new original from a hastily scribbled sketch I made …. which is sadly included in the book, too. Peter gets the last laugh, I suppose

I’m no sore loser, though. Below are both images, for your viewing pleasure:

While construction of the main site is crawling along at a geological pace, work on the Astoria segments is going swimmingly. As in butter, the Danish idiom goes; swimming in butter? Yeah, that fits the bill just fine

I’m still putting down uncommitting sketches, but I am making great progress in the concept department. The various pieces are coming into their own in ways that carry the corpus of the book to new, well, places if not heights

For the “Great Old Ones” piece, I will be working in information graphics, as described by Edward Tufte in his books “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and “Envisioning Information”. The clarity of his theories juxtaposed with the multivocal theme of “G.O.O.” will work pretty well, or at least confuse the reader enough to make him/her think. That is an ulterior goal, of course.

For “Our Lady of Centuries”, I am looking at dada and art concréte, and a director I worked with last year introduced me to some incredibly dense collage/scribble/paranoic delusive artwork that apparently were being left for strangers to find in the Copenhagen commuter trains, some years back (in photocopy, as I understand). The sprawling, occasional symmetry of these pieces have inspired me to work from strict grids in composing the spreads.

I spend a lot of time on the train each day, and I work through sketchbooks like a powerdrill. That works quite well with some of the more intuitive installemnts of the book, like “Brainfeeeders” [If anybody has a better title, I'm open to suggestions. The working title was filled in, rather than actuallly selected, when I needed a headline on the late website]. I am currently reworking and expanding upon the original piece, and it is essentially growing in all directions at the same time. As usual with that sort of piece, the hardest thing will be weeding out the weaker saplings.

The problem with working in the sketchbook is that I don’t have any time to scan from it right now. My sparse freetime is spent wrapping up the site :/

The countdown clock is ticking for this year’s Danish comic festival, Komiks.dk, held on May 31st and June 1st.

Like previous years, I have been invited to participate, and once again, I find myself wonderfullly under-utilized and free to do whatever I want. Which usually amounts to hanging out with colleagues during and after opening hours.

One signing of Black Mouth is scheduled on Sunday June 1st (at the Faraos Cigarer stall), but there will probably be another on Saturday at the Brun Blomst stall. Otherwise I will be at Gimle Studio’s booth most of the time, doodling, humming, having a laugh.. Wasting time. The usual.

Lest we forget the other guests, the festival has managed to attract such alternative (ie, non-superhero, non-duck and off-mainstream bande-desinées) creators as have been lacking in previous years. David B (Epileptic, Babel), Martin tom Dieck (Der Unschuldige Passagier, Hundert Ansichten der Speicherstadt) and theorist Thierry Groensteen are attending this year, along with more reader-friendly Italian fumettioli (is that a word?) Barbucci & Canepa (Sky Doll) and Duck-maestro Giorgio Cavazzano.

I make light of the fact that I haven’t been callled to participate in panels and such, but I can’t help noticing that my book has been casually omitted from the shortlist for the grand prize of the festival. The decision has to do with the publication date, I’m told, but books published on the same date have been taken into consideration, and I suspect there are other motives to the lapse. My publisher was told off the record that Black Mouth has had enough media coverage as it is, and it is true that I went on national tv twice in promotion of the book.

Well, pardon me for getting air time. I’m sorry for getting good reviews. And I’m terribly sorry that the nominators of the festival don’t see that as a value. Really. But one mustn’t forget that the festival at this point is a non-profit event, and the people behind it, enthusiast grassroots. For their effort and engagement, I salute them.

Yup, you may have noticed that all of a sudden I’m flooding the blog with posts after a, shall we say, meager period in the update department. The reason is that I have started dappling with offline blog editors, meaninng I can blog ahoy while commuting between Malmö and Copenhagen. First application up for trial is the w.bloggar editor, which seems to run smoothly enough – that is, if this sees print (screen?)

If this works out well, I’ll most likely stick with w.b; otherwise ecto, lipidr, and a host of others are lined up to take its place. Consider this a fair warning, little software

I’d promised myself – and you, faithful newsfeeder (or is it me who is the feeder, making you the eater?) – to have the site up in two weeks time counting from, oh, 2½ weeks ago …

No excuses, really, I’ve been having a blast in the meantime, to Brussels and back. The site’ll be up, no worries. It’s just going to last a little longer

Tags: procrastination, Brussels, excuses

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