Luisteleva-koira

In Finland, it's all about the dog. No cats on the backs of bicycles or ferrets on leads here. It's dogs all the way. No messing size-wise either. They are either small or huge, which just makes the pavement 10-yard-bark-offs all the more amusing. Anyway, I'm not an expert on dogs but the ones here are definitely a bit strange looking, especially the small ones. Either their heads are too big for their bodies, or they have tails as long as all of their legs combined. Very odd!

It is my artistic vision that I will eventually produce an upmarket photographic document of the dogs of Lahti, a lavishly appointed publication, equally at home on the coffee table or in the master-library of the koira connoisseur. But for now, here is a picture of a dog on roller skates.

Pig & Pigeon

I just finished a lil' comic strip to submit to Kuti magazine, a really nice broadsheet-format comics paper that's distributed free here in Finland, in a Paper Rodeo stylee. It features many of Finland's best cartoonists, and I haven't done many comics in recent years, so it's very unlikely they'll use it, but.. sometimes it just feels good to wave your oar around, even if everyone knows there is an outboard motor. My strip is about a pig and a pigeon. The pigeon character is terrible, but I wanted to call it Pig & Pigeon.

Their City, His War

In between watching videos by Chad VanGaalen and weird Russian animations on YouTube, I've been doing some research into this cat Black Peider. So.. is he a wrestler or a musician? Is he for real? Well, it seems he might have won Silver in the 1999 World Air Guitar Championships. But that's all I can tell you for today. And tomorrow.. well, I have some shopping to do..
What I can tell you is that he also draws cute comics in a very nice bold graphic style, under the pseudoname Petteri Tikkanen. And he's just released a new comic book, which is very rude, and which confuses his two names totally. Better do your own digging..

www.myspace.com/blackpeider
http://peider.vuodatus.net/

Our Lives Are In Our Hands (But Could You Hold Mine While I Take Off My Mittens?)

It's been hard getting used to the different direction of traffic flow in Finland. However, no-one is any hurry to cross any roads here so I have plenty of time to try and kick the tiny area of my brain dedicated to actual-dimensional-orientation into gear. The rule here is that you would never even think about crossing the road before the lights have changed. So you just stand there for some time, feeling extremely safe, cloaked in a glimmering shade of dangling bicycle reflectors. You contemplate things, stuff, you stare at the empty road, and you listen to the ghostly mewing of the saddest traffic lights in the world.
However, from your safe pavement perch, you then have to make the treacherous passage to the other side, brain-sick with the knowledge that the Finnish traffic system makes absolutely no sense. What makes this (significant) part of crossing the road so nerve-tighteningly worrying is the fact that traffic is apparently allowed to go through red lights here, as long as it's around a corner. To optimise the danger of this situation, (and perhaps thus keeping the population in a state of constant terror, and the shops well-stocked with high-visibility clothing), they seem to have done everything they can to ensure that, wherever possible, the traffic lights are situated directly on corners.
And so another bus slides hard around a 90 degree ice-blackened bend, lifting my coat bottom as it goes, and I'm reminded again how lucky we all are to be alive and able to run home like children and cry, our complex psychic defenses torn down like curtains of dust, and our Muumi reflectors clutched hard to our chests like rosaries.