{"id":20242,"date":"2019-06-12T09:28:34","date_gmt":"2019-06-12T09:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=20242"},"modified":"2019-06-12T09:28:34","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T09:28:34","slug":"the-troll-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2019\/06\/12\/the-troll-king\/","title":{"rendered":"The Troll King"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy Kolbeinn Karlsson<\/strong> (Top Shelf Productions)
\nISBN: 978-1-60309-061-2 (TPB)<\/p>\n

The power of fairy tales and magical sagas has shaped human thought and psychology fully\u00c2\u00a0as much as science and philosophy, and as such is infinitely evergreen – especially when seen\u00c2\u00a0through the lens of a truly gifted artist.<\/p>\n

Swedish artisan and imaginer Kolbeinn Karlsson was born in Uppsala in 1982, and studied at\u00c2\u00a0Malm\u00c3\u00b6’s Kvarnby School of Comic Arts. From 2006 he began publishing mini-comics which\u00c2\u00a0quickly won him a far-ranging and appreciative global audience. His stylish renderings have\u00c2\u00a0been published throughout Europe in magazines such as Strapazin<\/em>, Gl\u00c3\u00b6mp<\/em> and C’est Bon.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Troll King<\/strong> (available in both paperback and digital formats) is his first book, released in\u00c2\u00a02009 and since then adapted into an animated film. It’s a superb marriage of bizarre situations\u00c2\u00a0and legendary fictions, illustrated in a compelling, evocative and unique style, all tied\u00c2\u00a0together with a superb sense of guided absurdity that no fan of narrative art of fantastic\u00c2\u00a0fiction could possibly resist.<\/p>\n

It also gives the initial appearance of relating unrelated tales but that is not truly the case\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Two hairy overly-masculine hermits live together in the wilds: shunning civilisation,\u00c2\u00a0exercising, and secretly wishing they had a child. When they perform a rite to bind\u00c2\u00a0themselves together, a strange forest creature blesses their union and their greatest desire is\u00c2\u00a0made real\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, ‘Sleeping and Dreaming of Food’<\/em> a starving, hallucinating dwarf falls into the\u00c2\u00a0Black River and endures visions and strange transformations, even as in another elsewhere an\u00c2\u00a0ambulatory carrot invades an ornate indoor pool and begins to sprout uncontrollably\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

And so unravels a fevered stream of peculiar pictorial encounters that demand the reader’s\u00c2\u00a0full attention and participation, with always that ponderous forest presence intersecting the\u00c2\u00a0story strands\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Blending humour with horror and salutary moral warnings with random acts of fate, The\u00c2\u00a0Troll King <\/strong>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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 2009 Kolbeinn Karlsson. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00c2\u00a0as much as science and philosophy, and as such is infinitely evergreen – especially when seen\u00c2\u00a0through the lens of a truly gifted artist. Swedish artisan and imaginer Kolbeinn Karlsson was born in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Troll King”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[63,102,132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-european-classics","category-fantasy","category-older-kids"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-5gu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}