Joakim Pirinen

(1961) In 1985 this young new author managed to make the Swedish general public and cultural establishment aware of comics by creating his extremely successful psycho Socker-Conny, an anarchistic borderline personality with crazy ideas. Together with Lars Sjunnesson and Gunnar Lundkvist he influenced the development of alternative home comics. Thanks to their effort Swedish comics received strong political and grant-aided support which makes it possible for the medium to flourish even today. The author, who is a regular contributor to the legendary left-wing comics magazine Galago, often plays with both rough social topics and the cruel inner world of his characters, absurd black humour mixed with old grotesque, and with the legitimacy of the comics medium itself. He shows, visually, where Max Andersson´s black and white Dadaistic inspiration in his album Pixy came from. At the same time he escapes to a fine restless line bordering on abstraction. He is also a painter, film script writer and his theatre piece Familjen Bra (1986) is still being shown.