Narcosis the Cat comic strips #54 (2010) and #86 (2010-17). Inspired by the modern day digital printing errors of various kind, 1980s computer games with their low-resolution pixel style, and classic comic strip rasters.
Apokryfia is a series of graphic novels and comic strips. Graphic poems, if you will. The visions often start from sketch books, visual diaries.
Here’s a psychedelic companion musical piece for listening while reading – When It Is Raining from My Arms (2001):
“Fire Mask has a friend called Eyelip.”
“She follows him everywhere.”
“She is secretly in love with him.”
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! <3 This is from the comic strips of Narcosis the Cat Meets the Flapsticks.
Here’s a piece from the 2001 album World Lies in Leaves with a long ambient beginning and psychedelic trance ending.
The title and the theme of this song derives and was inspired from the penguin short story in the Disney film The Three Caballeros (1944). I saw it first time on a VHS in the 1980s and got it as a gift one memorable Christmas. The animated short tells the story of a penguin living in the South Pole. He doesn’t appreciate the cold conditions at all and dreams of sun, warmth and palm trees. I totally relate to that :).
Also, the title refers to the cyber punk science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick, which the movie Blade Runner (1982) was based on.
Hope you enjoy this trance of the past! More to come, stay tuned.
More wacky adventures of Explosion Land, part of the Flapsticks comic book worlds.
As a continuation to the previous blog post, a 2-part Sunday comic strip: Dumdow (the Angry Triangle) Meets the Bermuda Triangle or: Dumdow’s Most Eventful Boat Adventure of All-Time Blast Extravaganza (2010).
Early 1990s Bam and Bum – a.k.a. Bum and Pow from 1995 onward.
Bum and Pow – an antropomorphic bomb and a dynamite – are my oldest comic book characters still in use, from 1991. They are nowadays part of the Narcosis the Cat Meets the Flapsticks -comic book world that was re-discovered in 2007 from my 1997–1999 mathematics and physics book doodles and illustrations. I noticed that some of the characters, beings and things had obviously escaped from the same universe so I started to investigate these little critters, their peculiar habits and their world in a more accurate way.
1st Explosion Land strip from 2010.
Another usual day in Explosion Land.
In summer 1995 my grand mother Tellervo taught me to paint with oil colors. I chose the comic book characters Bum and Pow and Dumdow the Angry Triangle as my first motif. The painting was called Tight Spot (1995) which was also the name for a puzzle/platform computer game I was planning to code on Turbo Pascal.
Unfortunately the game was never finished. There are f.ex. animated rolling VHS tapes, cassettes, CDs, disks and other nowadays defunct but collectible electronic media you were supposed to collect in the game.
Stay tuned for more Explosion Land comic strips next time!
SUOMEKSI:
Olen piirtänyt ja luonut sarjakuvahahmoja pienestä pitäen. Olen löytänyt niitä myös mm. näkemällä niitä luonnon muovaamissa muodostelmissa ja fraktaalimaisissa kuvioissa. Räjähdysmaan asukit Bum-pommi ja Pow-dynamiitti ovat pitkäikäisimmät edelleen käytössä olevat hahmoni vuodelta 1991 (tuolloin nimillä Bam ja Bum). Minulla oli myös näihin hahmoihin pohjaava puzzle-tietokonepeli Tight Spot tekeillä vuonna 1996, mutta se jäi kesken. Nykyään nämä räjähdysherkät sankarit esiintyvät Narkoosi-kissa & Fläpstikkaat -sarjakuvien tarinoissa omassa maailmassaan.
And here’s the ten-years-after “2011 Nostalgie Remix” .
Narcosis the Cat cardboard cut-out (2010) painted on acrylics.
Narcosis the Cat is the main comic book character in the wacky adventures of Flapsticks. Check out more comic strips at http://
which are currently in Finnish, translations are coming. The blog will also feature English strips every now and then: here are all the strips currently available.
SUOMEKSI: Lue Narkoosi-kissa-sarjakuvast
Color pencils and ink, 10×15 cm. Inspired by Afrikan tähti (Star of Africa) board game, that is legendary in Finland. I have the original game by Kuvataide from 1950s in my collection which I inherited from my dear grand mother – she was an oil painter. We used to play the game a lot and I have fond memories of it. I also have the extremely rare Commodore 64 game adaptation (1986) made by Amersoft.
This art is from the Apokryfia sketch book #10 Kappa the Color where all the illustrations are in color, instead of mostly black and white of the other volumes.
By the way, Madagascar has traveled all the way to the exact opposite side of the “pool continent” here for some reason.
Fountain of Africa is from December 8th 2011 and it was a follow-up and based on the proximate black and white ink sketch from November 8th 2011. Mountains and some kind of a huge tree-sized plant make the surrounding setting in both and I picked the woman-motif and giraffe for the color work too,
The particular November-sketch on the other hand originates from my morphing graphic novel Apokryfia: Zeta (April 2011) — see the post Venus and the Dream Machine. There is a section happening in Africa with skeletons in the middle of the story where all this started from.
Pen drawing 21x 29 cm and a computer colorized version. Egypt, the Sphinx and pyramids have always inspired me. Notice the owl on top of the Sphinx and the All-Seeing Eye.
Pen 42×30 cm.
An eye sees a stream of beings and things. The hand in bottom center is curiously inspired by A Clockwork Orange. It is trying to turn the letter ‘A’ back to upwards. I signed as Psychic back in this time.
In the late 1990s I became interested in psychedelic visuals and began to draw in such style. “Where Is the Roof?” is the first finalized drawing of this era. This style still manifests itself occasionally in my Narcosis the Cat Meets the Flapsticks comic books and strips.