Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.08.2006, Qupperneq 7

Last issue, the Grapevine’s own featured
cartoonist, Hugleikur Dagsson, gave us an
enormous map with Icelandic horses abusing
each other with anal dildos. This issue, he
informs us he’s been signed to Penguin. We
met with the next big thing.
/// So when the hell did you get so famous?
– This week. I’m not famous yet. Give it
another week.
/// And you’ve sold an Icelandic comic col-
lection to an enormous English publish. I
had always thought these comics were meant
only for consumption here. Aren’t they
exploring the Icelandic mentality?
– Yeah, I think so. I wasn’t really sure at the
time, when I first did them. I really didn’t do
these kind of comics to publish them, I did
them without thinking.
/// How did this all start?
– Actually, there was this arts show in Seyðis-
fjörður in 2001, the summer of 2001, and I
was participating in a art show with two other
artists and there was like an hour until the
show started. I just wanted to put more into
my show, and I had these small pieces of paper
in front of me, and I drew two little figures,
stick figures, and one of them said ‘Fuck me’
in Icelandic. And then I just got another
piece of paper and drew something else, and I
did like 30 drawings in 20 minutes, that’s the
first 30 pages in my first book.
/// Which isn’t Avoid Us?
– No, it’s Love Us. Which was self-published.
/// It’s a long way from Syðisfjörður to
London, though. What happened after the
show?
– I kept on doing this ‘cause I got a really
good response at the show, and I graduated
in 2002 from art school and started working
with like disabled teenagers, artistic teenag-
ers in Garðabær, FG. I had these comics, so,
when you graduate from art school you have
to do some art, and I had these drawings, and
I decided just to print them and staple them
together and try to sell them. I put them in
stores like Dogma and Eymundsson and 12
Tónar and they got some really good atten-
tion.
I did that for three Christmases, next
Christmas I did ‘Kill us’ and then ‘Fuck us’.
/// Nothing says Christmas like Fuck Us.
– Then JPV contacted me and I made a deal
with him and published AVOID US, Col-
lected Works, and the same year I did Save us.
/// And you’ve been with the grapevine since
kill us?
– I think so. The first thing I did for Grape-
vine was Whaley, I had done Kill Us and was
working on Fuck Us by then.
/// I have to ask, as an artist, isn’t it shocking
or appalling having these simple sketches be
the work that finds success, not the work you
trained for?
– No it’s not shocking. I never even considered
them sketches, just really simple drawings.
Yeah, I was just happy, actually, because of
everything I did, the thing that was the easiest
was the one that succeeded. The easiest thing
I do is what I live on now. But it’s not always
easy. Sometimes I have a deadline and I have
to do maybe 40 or 50 drawings in one day, and
I usually do it when it’s late at night. When
you’re in the middle of that, your mind gets
kind of worked into a weird state.
/// I still want to say, how do you print these
works in a place without the social context?
These are works of social criticism, right?
– Well, I went to a Danish comic book
convention in April, with ‘Avoid us’, and you
know, people liked it. Americans, British peo-
ple and like Danish people, and many Danish
people said it was very much like the Danish
sense of humour. But I’m not really sure what
the Icelandic sense of humour is. I guess it is
a cold humour, cold and dark humour, that’s
what Icelandic sense of humour is. You can see
dark humour everywhere.
/// Yes, there is dark humour everywhere.
But here, in a country where the media and
public dialogue is required to be positive,
then your work functions as social criticism.
– That’s a good point. Yeah, I can see the
social commentary in my own work but it was
eh, that was almost accidental, when I got my
first review, when people started talking about
how I was doing this, and I was very pleased
because at one point I felt extra pressure,
because now I had to keep writing relevant
comics.
/// And in England they’ll be as funny but
they won’t have the same function.
– That’s probably true. Maybe I should move
to England and work on my book there, and
then move to the States and you know, con-
quer the world that way.
/// You could finish up in Japan.
– Yeah, I’d like that. But they have the sickest
shit in Japan.
/// You mean manga about little schoolgirls.
– Someone told me, though, because of all
the countries I’d really like to be published in,
Japan would be the coolest, but people told me
they don’t have sarcasm there. So I see all the
sick comics I read from Japan are not sarcastic,
they’re just really sincere.
/// That’s gotta be disappointing. They have
to have sarcasm, they like Godzilla.
– Yeah, but maybe the sarcasm is very fine.
Almost invisible sometimes.
/// Let’s talk about subject matter. In our last
issue, you went crazy over priests. You were
once censored for criticising priests. But
you’ve told me that priests love your work.
– Well, I did that map over two days and
spent probably eight to ten consecutive hours
on that. And when you’re just working for
a short time I have to find something to do
and don’t repeat myself, so there was a lot of
priests and a lot of ass on it. One time, there
was a priest singing about ass.
Perfectly Brutal Exports
An interview with Hugleikur Dagsson
by bart cameron photo by skari
interview
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