Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Jens K. Styve lives in Tromsø, Norway, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. In 2016, he entered a comic strip competition run by Norwegian tabloid newspaper Dagbladet. His autobiographical comic strips featured himself wearing a conical yellow hat very like a dunce-cap, so he named the strip Dunce. The first prize was a daily spot in the newspaper for four months. Dunce won that prize and it has been running there ever since. It has also found its way into thirty other newspapers across Scandinavia plus one in Latin America. There are six Norwegian book collections available so far, and translated editions in Sweden, Finland, France, Spain and Mexico.
Dunce is a humour strip about everyday life so far north that the North Pole is just 2200 kilometres away. Silly slice-of-life observations frequently slip into surreal and farcical situations with the main character Jens K, a single father running a tiny web company with his colleague Børge who appears to be an evolved fish. He has a nine-year-old son called Gustav, and a dog, Brego who also has a lot to say. The wonderfully deft cartooning creates such tremendously appealing characters and a beautifully rendered environment for them to live in that every kind of setting is filled with delightfully funny personality and quirky, expertly rendered atmosphere. This book is great to look at.
For years, Styve has been putting English translations of his strips on his website and social media pages, and publishing small collections via kickstarter; finally with no publishing interest in the UK or the US he has taken the task on himself. Dunce: Arctic Tails is independently published via Amazon. It’s a 196-page softcover book containing daily comic strips, some stand-alone stories, a 19-page Christmas special and an extended story sequence where Gustav makes it his mission to save the Mexican rainforest – from his bedroom. Most of this material is from the fifth Norwegian book collection Impulskontroll and this does mean English readers are challenged at the beginning to understand who the characters are, how they relate to each other and what the dynamic is, because there isn’t an introduction to ease you in.
It’s understandable that for a book aimed at a new audience Styve would want to go with his latest work that he’s most excited by, but the lack of even a single ‘who’s who’ page explaining the characters and their motivations gives readers a lot of work to do. Luckily the art is so beguiling there’s a strong incentive to stick with it till you’ve figured it all out. Dunce has won numerous awards and was named ‘best Norwegian comic of the decade’ by comic journal Serienett in January 2020, but is barely known outside Scandinavia. Let’s hope Dunce: Arctic Tails can change this because there are years of previous strip collections that could follow this volume into English.
