The Troll King - Softcover

Swedish cartoonist Karlsson's first book is the closest thing comics have yet produced to, say, Devendra Banhart's music: psychedelic, shambolic, mystical, very hairy, and redolent of musk. It's low on text--there's no dialogue at all in its second half--but high on... well, any number of things. The book is a series of linked stories about various woodland monsters; its first piece concerns a pair of fur-covered, bodybuilding creatures who are married in a dance ritual witnessed by a burning wicker figurine. Karlsson's artwork has some obvious inspirations from a previous generation of art cartoonists--there's a little of Mike Diana's violent/sexual grossouts and fanatically intense mark making, a little of Jim Woodring's silent, fantastical world-building and supersaturated color palette--but it's also got its own heady aesthetic, shifting between crude, wobbly rendering and subtle attention to details of body language and facial expressions. His stories are vivid as a fever dream, very vaguely grounded in the real world (a few characters shop at a chain supermarket), but mostly sweaty, uncanny, and intuitive rather than logical: this is the kind of book whose most straightforward story involves a bulbous carrotman who wades into a hot pool and is transformed into an enormous tree.
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