By Kolbeinn Karlsson (Top Shelf Productions)
ISBN: 978-1-60309-061-2 (TPB)
The power of fairy tales and magical sagas has shaped human thought and psychology fully as much as science and philosophy, and as such is infinitely evergreen – especially when seen through the lens of a truly gifted artist.
Swedish artisan and imaginer Kolbeinn Karlsson was born in Uppsala in 1982, and studied at Malmö’s Kvarnby School of Comic Arts. From 2006 he began publishing mini-comics which quickly won him a far-ranging and appreciative global audience. His stylish renderings have been published throughout Europe in magazines such as Strapazin, Glömp and C’est Bon.
The Troll King (available in both paperback and digital formats) is his first book, released in 2009 and since then adapted into an animated film. It’s a superb marriage of bizarre situations and legendary fictions, illustrated in a compelling, evocative and unique style, all tied together with a superb sense of guided absurdity that no fan of narrative art of fantastic fiction could possibly resist.
It also gives the initial appearance of relating unrelated tales but that is not truly the case…
Two hairy overly-masculine hermits live together in the wilds: shunning civilisation, exercising, and secretly wishing they had a child. When they perform a rite to bind themselves together, a strange forest creature blesses their union and their greatest desire is made real…
Elsewhere, ‘Sleeping and Dreaming of Food’ a starving, hallucinating dwarf falls into the Black River and endures visions and strange transformations, even as in another elsewhere an ambulatory carrot invades an ornate indoor pool and begins to sprout uncontrollably…
And so unravels a fevered stream of peculiar pictorial encounters that demand the reader’s full attention and participation, with always that ponderous forest presence intersecting the story strands…
Blending humour with horror and salutary moral warnings with random acts of fate, The Troll King offers a truly unsettling but incredibly rewarding walk on the weird wild side thatwill haunt your dreams until you can no longer separate the surreal from the ridiculous…
© 2009 Kolbeinn Karlsson. All rights reserved.