Fäderneav

Panel from “Box 19008”, by Ulf Jansson (Epix, 1986-1992)

I’ve just spent a very enjoyable ten days working on heritage comics with a team from Malmö University and Malmö Museum, hosted by the Ystad Konstmuseum and the Klostrets i Ystad Museum. The project was organised by Gunnar Krantz and Jakob Dittmar at Malmö University, as part of an overarching series on different kinds of storytelling in comics. The programme brought gave me a chance to talk with museum curators and exhibition designers, specialists in visual communication, comics researchers and even Swedish cartoonists and comics creators about the Oswestry Heritage Comics project. The objective was to demonstrate how comics about local heritage can be used to talk about the past in a different kind of way – a way that combines facts and information about the past with discussion of things like identity, memory, and the meaning and importance of place. Malmö has a particularly active and vibrant comics community, so it was a great privilege to meet comics artists like Karolina Bång and Gunnar and work with them on a whole range of heritage and comics ideas. It’s extremely exciting to see the Oswestry Heritage Comics inspiring both comics artists and museum/heritage organisations to look more seriously at the use of comics as a tool for interpreting and presenting the past.