If you are an Anders Loves Maria fan and you have so many questions for Rene just burning you up inside, hopefully I have asked them on your behalf in this interview — some of them, though, coated in a layer of my own sarcasm. Rene, meanwhile, is pure graciousness, as you shall see.

Rene Engström, doing a bit of an 'author photo'.

Patrick Alexander: Okay, let’s do this shit. Let’s poop it out.

Rene Engström: All right!

Patrick: Rene! Good evening! Hello!

Rene: Hello, Patrick!

Patrick: You have asked me to interview you about Anders Loves Maria, your famous webcomic, recently concluded. CORRECT??

Rene: That is correct.

Patrick: WHY COME.

Rene: Because there was no possible way for me to answer all the mail, comments and questions pouring in. I needed a way to get this all done at once, and I thought, “Why not do this in a fun way.” I also thought, “Patrick’s fun, I’ll ask Patrick to help me out.”

Patrick: Well, before I ask any questions, I should say congratulations on your accomplishment.

Rene: Thank you!

Patrick: It’s about 300 pages of comic, you said.

Rene: That’s right. Almost exactly 300 I think.

Patrick: In only a few years. I’ve read complaints about the irregularity of Anders Loves Maria’s updates, but it’s pretty clear you’ve been working very steadily.

Rene: I don’t think 100 pages per year is a bad rate at all. I think it’s quite average, actually.

There has traditionally been a pressure in webcomics to produce constantly, preferably every day. And while this is certainly helpful in increasing and keeping one’s readership, it doesn’t always work for everyone. You are starting to see a lot more successful webcomics breaking away from this trend.

I chose to sacrifice immediate readers for the sake of my health and family. I sort of knew that they would be back once the comic was finished anyway.

Patrick: Quite! Everyone seems to have come out of the woodwork to comment on the final update. There’s a lot of gosh-wow-thankyou, which must be gratifying.

Rene: Yes. It’s certainly better than an empty, echoing auditorium. But sadly I am kind of deaf to both praise and punishment at this point. I know that sounds sort of arrogant, but I am rather desensitised to it all. I’ve stopped reading a lot of the comments altogether. They drive me mental.

Patrick: I know what you mean.

Rene: It’s a lot different now that the comic is over because there isn’t any added pressure.

Patrick: How have you been feeling, since finishing the comic?

Rene: Good. At peace. The response has been wonderful and not too many people hate me for the abrupt ending. I have been diligently working on the book and completing sketch orders, all anxiety-free.

Patrick: Ah, so! Yes! I have been browsing the comments, and the main recurring question is: MAKE BOOK? YOU MAKE BOOK?

Rene: I am making a real, paper-book, yes. With pages and everything.

Patrick: Dang, fancy.

Rene: I am talking with the publisher about doing a fancy, over-sized hardcover, first. And then doing a regular paperback version.

Patrick: Rene, can we disclose to the proles who the publisher is? I mean it doesn’t really matter but I’m sure they’d like to know; they’re so excitable.

Rene: I am working with the lovely people over at [CENSORED]. No one [CENSORED] the [CENSORED] better than they do.

Patrick: [CENSORED]!

Rene: [CENSORED].

Patrick: No. But you’ve created something that a lot of people respond strongly to.

Rene: It seems I have. The strong emotional investment in Anders Loves Maria is something I never anticipated. I’m not sure how to feel about that. But maybe it’s because I am emotionally invested in it myself.

Patrick: Yeah, you shouldn’t be surprised, given how attached to the characters you are yourself.

Rene: I know. I guess I’m just surprised over the response in general. It’s just my little story, you know.

Patrick: You are probably the most famous Swedish cartoonist internationally, right now.

Rene: Arguably, yes.

Patrick: About the book again: From earlier conversations, I know two things:

One: You edited down the ending quite a lot before drawing it; it was going to be quite a bit longer.

Two: You’re adding some more material to the print version… but not to the ending! You’re adding stuff earlier in the story.

What’s up with THAAAAAT?

Rene: One: I planned on editing it down a lot, but in the end I changed my mind. There were over 30 pages left in my original ending and my original cut was going to leave me with an ending of 10 pages, but it ended up being around 20 or possibly more.

Two: There are some parts to the earlier half of the story that were originally cut because I was bound to a contract to update once a week, and the story wasn’t going anywhere at this snail’s pace. Nothing necessarily overly important to the plot, but plenty of the story, particularly with Yumi and Magnus, was left entirely unfinished and open. I might add some stuff to the later half, after some revision. We’ll see.

Patrick: Yeah, there are a quite a few comments expressing frustration at all the ‘loose ends’. Some of these complaints might be more valid than others, though. There’s one guy going, “We don’t even know why Anders and Maria are in love! We didn’t get to see that! UGGGHHH this comic is so FRUUUSTRATING, UGGGHHHHH!!”

Rene: I think sometimes it is best to let the readers fill in those gaps themselves. I would never insult my readers’ intelligences and I treat them as I expect myself to be treated by an author.

My answer to the reader you mention would be, “Is it so important to know?”

That being said, I will revise the story to see if there are some things that could be explained better.

Patrick: RENE WHAT HAPPENED TO MARIO AND BJORK’S BABY??

YOU DIDN’T SPEND FIVE PAGES EXPLAINING IT EXPLICITLY

Rene: They sold it on the black market to fund their boozing habits.

Patrick: Oh, that’s what I thought. But I can’t relax until I know what happened ‘canonically’.

Rene: Now you know. Sleep well.

Patrick: Also Rene, I couldn’t help but notice there was no dénouement in which Anders falls, weeping, to his knees, and declares to the heavens, “My philandering ways end this day, forever!” So I’m not satisfied; I need Hollywood-style moral justice.

Rene: Anders is a hopeless philanderer. I’m not sure this would even change his ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make a responsible adult out of him in some ways.

Patrick: NOOO MY NEATLY RESOLVED CHARACTER ARC, NOOOOO

Rene: I’m sorry, Patrick. *pat pat*

Patrick: Throughout Anders Loves Maria’s serialisation, there have been a lot of readers waiting for Anders to be punished somehow. Reading between the lines, these readers were frustrated that you weren’t as willing to judge your characters as they were. So it seems to me.

Rene: Hmm. That’s odd, and here I think I punish Anders all the time by putting him in situations everyone knows he will fuck up in some sense.

But I think I know what you mean, I don’t judge Anders as a person for what he does. He’s not evil. I don’t think he has much of a mean streak either.

Patrick: No, he seems very easy-going, which is a strength in some ways and a weakness in others.

Rene: He is very easy-going and quite likeable, sometimes for very superficial reasons. He’s also rather unknowingly selfish. But in the end I think he’s very loyal and dependable when it comes to what he thinks is important.

Patrick: An odd but interesting criticism has come up a few times in these comments: that the ending is, er… I guess misogynistic is the implication. Because two female characters died so that the male character could develop.

Do you think, for example, that before killing herself, Tina should have taken into consideration what sort of literary precedent that would set?

Rene: That is interesting because I do see myself as a feminist. I think you can make a much stronger feminist statement without writing invincible women.

Another factor is that I don’t write genders. To me they are all genderless. Or to be more specific, they are all me. I guess I try to stick to writing genuine emotions and not political statements.

Patrick: How irresponsible!

Rene: Tja…

Patrick: Well I never. What are we supposed to learn about human nature from “genuine emotions”? The best stories come from writing the world as it should be, not as it is. That’s how you get masterpieces like Atlas Shrugged.

Rene: I like “as it should be” stories too. But I don’t like writing them. I think Swedes in general have a tendency to write “as it shouldn’t be” stories. I am a Canadian as well, so perhaps I fall somewhere in-between.

Patrick: Anders Loves Maria represents three years of your life. How do you feel, looking back? Your life has changed a lot.

Rene: It is mentally exhausting to think about the changes that have gone on. I’m surprised I’ve survived it all.

I’m not sure how much into detail I should go on about my private life, or if that is really interesting to readers. It seems to really only concern people when it comes to abruptions in updates. :)

Patrick: I was thinking, for instance: When you look at a page of Anders Loves Maria, you’re not just going to see the story — you’re going to remember where you were when you drew it; how you were feeling; maybe you had to interrupt it to make lunch for your children. You’re going to remember your children growing up. Anders Loves Maria is like a tangible artifact of a chunk of your life.

Rene: Oh I see what you mean. Yes it is a very private sort of diary for me. A lot of strips remind me of what was going on in my life at the time, and a lot of the events in the comic have coincided with a lot that was going on in my life, quite unintentionally.

This brings us back to what happened with Björn and Maria’s baby, and perhaps why I chose not to right-out draw them having an abortion, because I was painfully going through my own at the time.

Patrick: You and I wouldn’t be friends if it weren’t for Anders Loves Maria!

Rene: That’s true. I have made a lot of new friends in this close-knit, gossipy webcomics community! You being one of my favourites!

Patrick: Shucks and golly.

It’s a little strange that Anders Loves Maria has finished, because I am unfamiliar with pre-Anders Loves Maria Rene. You wouldn’t exist, for me, without the comic. So you and the comic are closely associated in my mind.

Rene: Well, Patrick, pre-Anders Loves Maria Rene is essentially the same, I think. I still lead a quite unglamourous, diaper-changing existence. I am not a ‘celebrity’ in any practical sense of the word. I do not have a luxury boat and I would have to queue to get into clubs, if I did indeed go to clubs at all.

Patrick: It’s true that you are not glamourous (although very lovely). But, you did maintain a modest living through Anders Loves Maria, which is pretty nice. As you said to me, you’ve already made more money from Anders Loves Maria than most published cartoonists make from their books.

Rene: I’ve made enough to (barely) get by on my art, which is a fortune for most cartoonists. I could have made more if I actually got into merchandising, but I could never really muster up the courage for that. I think I’ll be stronger for the next project though.

And it’s true, I know people that have had best-sellers and not made enough to cover the costs of their materials. Which is probably why I never considered not trying webcomics as a business model. It’s not as if it excludes putting your work in print.

Patrick: Yeah, there’s really nothing to lose and everything to gain, with webcomics, and that goes for publishers as well as cartoonists. I expect in the next few years, we’ll see more and more publishers dropping that “We won’t publish anything that has been published elsewhere before” nonsense. Reality has debunked that idea. Not just for cartoonists — for writers too.

Rene: I think so too.

I’m really curious about webpublishing for ‘proper’ books. It’s something I know very little about. I see adverts on my site for them every now and then. I would love to get some tips on some good stuff being published.

Patrick: Rene, before we finish, is there anything else you think your readers might like to hear from you? Anything obvious I haven’t asked?

Rene: Have we talked about future projects? I’m unsure. I did two interviews earlier today already so my head’s a little foggy.

Patrick: We haven’t! I was gonna ask, but I assumed the answer would be, “Well right now I’m just focusing on getting the Anders Loves Maria book done.” I shouldn’t have assumed! Tell me about future projects if you want to.

Rene: Well I did plan on just working on the book, but inspiration hit me for my next project. This is perhaps wrong of me, but I plan on it being a Big Literary Deal, and my hopes are for it to be one of the best Swedish graphic novels of all time. It will not be a relationship drama like Anders Loves Maria, but there will be plenty of drama and mystery and jumping between timelines. So readers will find themselves very familiar with the storytelling. But this time around it will be more organised, right from the start. And for the sake of a future book, I’ll try stick to one size.

Plot-wise I do not want to reveal too much, but it will deal with finding one’s place in the world.

Patrick: Wow, well, you sound all confident and energised!

Rene: I am. It’s a good story, that I know. I just hope I am capable enough to pull it off. It’s a messy story though, so I have a lot of sorting and planning to do.

I might try for an autumn release. That’s September, for you southern hemisphere types.

Patrick: You mean, for the whole thing?

Rene: No, for starting.

Patrick: Right. I was gonna say! Well, I’m excited for you.

Thank you for a pleasant chat, Rene! I hope you said everything you wanted to say.

Rene: Thank you, Patrick. This has been a big help!

Recently, for a couple of months, I offered original, custom artworks to readers of Hilarity Comics who made PayPal donations to the site. And here they freaking are!

(I also added these to my deviantART gallery, with little descriptions that I couldn’t be bothered repeating here.)

Sometimes I make this improvised, ramen-like thing at home. It’s not nearly as good as proper ramen, but it’s got miso and pork and it does the trick. Let’s call it ’sorta-ramen’, or 「ソータ　ラーメン」 if you want it to seem authentic.

Beloved comic strip

Chicken Nation: Calvin and Hobbes was a wonderful comic strip.

Bill Watterson: Thank you; I was very happy with it.

CN: It ended a long time ago, didn’t it?

BW: Yes, it sure did.

CN: Did it really end a long time ago?

BW: That’s right.

CN: That’s a long time!

BW: Yes.

CN: Mr Watterson, thank you.

Chicken Nation would like to thank John Campanelli for his assistance with this story.

I love martial arts films. I mean, obviously. Does anyone not love martial arts films? Anyone who counts, I mean.

I’ve just watched Chocolate, directed by Prachya Pinkaew, who did the Tony Jaa films Ong-Bak and Tom-Yum-Goong. It’s about an autistic girl (called Zen) who becomes a martial arts genius by watching Ong-Bak and Tom-Yum-Goong. Brilliant. I mean, silly, but it’s Pinkaew’s way of telling you, “Hey, you know those films I made, that you love? Well this is another one, that you will also love!” And he was so right.

Zen’s autism is a magical plot device, making her able to mentally absorb people’s moves by watching them fight. But at the same time — certainly in the first act — Chocolate seems sincerely earnest about portraying autism seriously. And succeeds, I think! The acting is very good. So Pinkaew gets to eat his cake and still have it, there. The concept also produces, in the character of Zen, the paradoxical combination of two fantasy-asian-girl stereotypes: The doe-eyed, special, moe, fragile flower; and the hot, unstoppable, kick-arse martial arts babe. What a genius. I bet this film made so much money.

Towards the end of Chocolate, Zen meets her match in what, realistically, can only be termed a ‘retard fight’. When you term it thus, you will probably do so with both fists in the air, and at the top of your voice. You may then feel sort of ashamed. But come on.

I should mention that Chocolate is all about the setpieces. If you want to make a good martial arts film, the formula is really very simple: Create an awesome-looking location, and put a fight in it. Think of choosing stages in a fighting game. Same thing. Tom-Yum-Goong is an odd, disjointed, pretty shitty film — but it also has a fight in a Buddhist temple, in water, and the temple is on fire. All you have to do to enjoy this sort of film is look at it. The point is, Chocolate has a fight scene in a big butchery, with knives, and meat hanging everywhere. I’ve never seen that before.

Anyway, anyway — this isn’t supposed to be a review; I’m actually posting about Chocolate entirely because I wanted to show you this image:

This shot, from early in the film, is about two seconds long, and of no importance. But look at it — it’s wonderful!

• Crows
• Antennas
• Silhouette
• Sunset

I bet it wasn’t planned; I bet Pinkaew and his crew were on their way somewhere else, and Pinkaew saw this and went, “Shit! Wow! Set up the camera and film that. Shit; look at that.” (I feel like it was spontaneous, because otherwise the crows would be computer generated.)

For the past three years I’ve had attractive, well-designed Japanese diary/planners. This year, I’m back in Australia, where every diary is a piece of shit. Most are black on the outside; those that aren’t are garish and/or ugly. All diaries have white pages printed with black ink, and only black ink. Neither any effort nor inspiration has gone into the design of their boring, boxy interiors. Do the makers of these awful things not realise that people are going to be looking inside their diaries every day, probably many times? They are, after all, diaries.

Another problem is the lack of month-to-view diaries — you can only get day-to-page or week-to-view, neither of which are of use to me. I searched and searched and found only two month-to-view diaries, one of which was spiral-bound, and I hate anything spiral-bound: it gets tatty; it can be difficult to turn the pages; the spiral warps or breaks. That left me with the Moleskine® Monthly Notebook Diary, which despite its high price and fancy branding is still a piece of shit. A slightly less malodourous piece of shit than many of its competitors, but — well, let me show you what I’ve been accustomed to.

Here’s my 2009 diary by Mark’s Inc., next to my tedious new Moleskine® brand whatever:

See, ‘not black’ doesn’t have to mean ’something you’d wrap a birthday present for a six-year-old in’. That metallic mauve world map is perfectly sophisticated, without being a boring nothing.

Name and number of the month, days of the week (in both kanji and English), public holidays and special days, phases of the moon, and reference calendars for the two adjacent months — all included without confusing the eye or crowding the page; there’s plenty of room for notes in the generous left and bottom margins, and the unused spaces for days.

Each month has its own main colour, mostly for variety; October 2008’s is yellow-brown or gold. The name and number of the month is printed in this colour, as are the horizontal and vertical dividing lines, and a bar of colour along the right edge of each spread that makes it easy to find a particular month when flipping through the diary. The horizontal dividing lines are solid, while the vertical ones are dotted — subtly but effectively creating an instantly clear visual block for each week. Names and numbers of weekdays are the only things printed in black; Saturdays are blue and Sundays and holidays are red.

I hate notebooks and diaries that are printed in black, because whatever I write in them will be either lost, if I write in black, or overwhelmed, if I write in pencil or coloured pen. When my eye falls on a used page in a notebook, the bloody lines I wrote on shouldn’t be the first thing I notice. I shouldn’t notice them at all, in fact.

Here’s the bloody Moleskine:

First of all: Look at that fucking show-through! I’m expected to write on both sides of this paper? Really? The show-through in this diary is just ridiculous — it’s bad enough in the photos; it looks even worse in real life.

I complained above about all diaries for sale in this country using black ink on white paper. To be fair to the Moleskine diary, it uses not-quite-black ink on off-white paper, which is easier on the eyes, though still very plain. At least the dividing lines, and the lines on the notebook pages, are cunthair thin — I’ve seen many diaries and notebooks with bold black lines; god knows what some idiots are thinking. You don’t want to pay a proper designer? Fine. You can’t afford to print in more than one colour? Sure. But why pick black, or anything like black? You know there are other colours, right, and you’re allowed to use them? Why not light blue, or green, or even brown?

Back to the Moleskine: I understand they’re going for sophisticated minimalism or whatever, but I think this monthly view is poorly, lazily designed. Public holidays aren’t even written in — there’s a tiny symbol to indicate them, easily missed next to the phases of the moon. Positioning the numbers of days bottom-centre means a whole chunk of each square is taken up — probably the bottom 5mm — instead of just a corner. And in a month-to-view diary, the space available to each day is especially valuable. The rightmost column is labelled ‘Notes’, as if I wouldn’t have realised otherwise that I could write things in the empty spaces.

There’s also the font used for the names of months. It’s a bit fancy and modern — seems out of place in this intentionally plain diary. I dunno; just bugs me a little.

Oh! Another thing I wanted to mention is that the Moleskine diary contains only 12 months. Ridiculous. Calendars and diaries should also contain at least December from the preceding year and January from the next. My 2009 diary goes from September 2008 to January 2010.

More compare/contrast: World times from the Mark’s Inc. 2009 diary:

Clear, thorough, and easy on the eye. Some countries and states (no examples in this photo; sorry) even have specific times written beneath their names, where they deviate from the longitudinal norm — for example, Myanmar, in the ‘-3′ column, is marked ‘-2:30′.

World times from the Moleskine:

PFFFFF, WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT?

Here’s something very important: All my Japanese diaries have had plastic covers with a place to hold a pen or pencil:

The Moleskine doesn’t have a pencil holder; very few diaries I’ve seen for sale in Australia have pencil holders. A diary without a pencil is useless; it doesn’t work — it is an incomplete, non-functional object. Is this so hard to understand? We’re not talking about diaries you keep in a desk drawer and write your thoughts in at night — we’re talking about planners; you carry them around with you, and need to be able to write in them at any time.

The Moleskine does have a potentially quite handy pocket at the back, containing “the history of the Moleskine notebook”:

I’m supposed to read that and feel privileged to have spent 30-odd dollars on this fucking thing.

It has a Moleskine® brand ribbon, which is quite nice, though I’ve never had a problem just folding the corner of whatever month I’m on. (Perhaps I could tie a pencil to it.)

My 2009 diary has 22 pages of very light yellow lined paper, and 20 pages of very light pink dotted grid paper:

It also has, in addition to the usual diary stuff, ten pages of words and phrases in five languages! I was impressed by that. A lot of thought has gone into this excellent diary, and I’m going to miss it.

The Moleskine, meanwhile, is a Moleskine® brand notebook with half-arsed diary stuff printed on some of the pages. If they’d made it a better diary, it would have ceased to be a Moleskine®; it wouldn’t fit the brand. I guess I’m saying they shouldn’t have made diaries at all — but, if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to buy a month-to-view diary. So… whatever.

What we can all take away from these 1200 words is that I really, really care about stationery.

]]> http://www.chickennation.com/2010/01/06/i-hate-my-2010-diary/feed/ 5 http://www.chickennation.com/2010/01/01/happy-new-decade/ http://www.chickennation.com/2010/01/01/happy-new-decade/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:29:28 +0000 Patrick http://www.chickennation.com/?p=253

That’s a nengajou commissioned by my friend Justin in Shizuoka (the city I lived in, in Japan). I was so pleased with it that I asked Justin if I could use it for my own New Year’s emails. Thanks, Justin!

2010 is the year of the tiger, so eat lots of Frosties I guess? Or you could enjoy the Japanese tradition of choking on mochi:

Because of mochi’s extremely sticky texture, there is usually a small number of choking deaths around New Year in Japan, particularly amongst the elderly. The death toll is reported in newspapers in the days after New Year.

It’s a new decade. The year 2000 was ten years ago — what the hell? Where did ten years go? From time to time a young adult will email me and say something like, “I grew up with your comics.” What? What? How is that possible? What does that mean?

Everything Says Hello (2009)

This post was originally a portfolio page, but I’ve changed my mind about how to organise such stuff on this website. You can now consider this gallery an overview of the last few years, up ’til the time of posting.

The illustrations below are sampled from both personal and professional work, including a number of commissions for private clients. If you’d like to see more of this sort of thing, visit my deviantART gallery, and/or read some of my webcomics.

YES, OF COURSE Patrick does commissions. Apart from his usual comics and illustrations, he would especially like to design character stationery, and make art for videogames somehow. Just putting that out there.

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Made by Rebecca Clements and me, Patrick Alexander. This is our tribute to Michael Jackson; I think it is the best tribute.

Thanks to Jake, Komala and Wander.