Book review | Cartoonist Ville Ranta returns to the Muhammed riot and at the same time nicely portrays the melancholy of middle age

Comics

Ville Ranta: Wine drinkers. WSOY. 240 p.

Many like Ville Rantaa (b. 1978) as a brilliant contemporary cartoonist, the most competent for decades.

Ranta is also an ideal interviewee, who is able to enthusiastically tell about the nuances of the work. In interviews, however, Ranta is regularly titled as a comic artist.

That’s because even before his breakthrough as a political cartoonist, Ranta had made numerous comic novels. Now one has come again, Wine drinkers.

What About wine drinkers does the newspaper reader who has followed cartoonist Ranta’s firing in Iltalehti between 2019 and 2024 and from this fall in Helsingin Sanomat get wet? Ranta started in Hesar at the end of August.

Reader the book also gives a picture of life’s work as a cartoonist. Wine drinkersalbum drips with middle age melancholy. The author revisits on many levels how the Muhammed cartoon scandal (2006) complicated the already complex dynamics of his circle of friends.

Wine drinkers the persons edit Northern Finland’s famous cultural magazine Kaltiota. Ranta was an illustrator for a magazine published in Oulu. The magazine was also covered by the editor-in-chief and two editors.

In Kohu, Ranta drew prophet Muhammads as a side business. Kaltio’s government got really scared and took the caricatures from the internet. Editor-in-Chief of Kaltio Jussi Vilkuna got fired. Ranta left. The decomposition was not controlled.

In Viininjujoki, Ville Ranta sticks to only the additional reddish color.

The beach the apparently carefree drawing style, which is so strongly played even in caricatures, carries a cartoon novel in which Ranta returns to Oulu for a short time. He plans to meet the old Kalti gang, if they can accommodate the current editor-in-chief Paavo J. Heinonen sauna shift.

There is an impressive honesty in the portrayal of characters – the way Ranna’s self-portrait sees the differences between people.

It is surprising how drunkenness still plays the central role of jester and protector even in the key novel of the 2020s about cultured people.

The best In wine drinkers is how Ranta describes friendship. He also reaches for the feeling of how the spark of youth, in its original dizzying certainty, is absent from the middle-aged. Gone somewhere!

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There is an impressive honesty in describing the characters.

However, not all characters in the comic book interpret the same way. Aging is not a loss.

Impulsive Jussi Vilkuna appears in the work as Simo Appelgren. The handsome Paavo J. Heinonen is Samuli K. Berg. Supplier Katariina Parhi is described as Jutta.

Ville In perhaps the most fascinating comic novel on the beach Yes and no (2013) also had names in key roles Simon Appelgren and Samuli Berg. They were real characters from the 19th century history of the city of Oulu. Those creative influencers in the traditional culture of their time were drawn in the book as Kalti’s co-workers.

Ranta, who has experienced bumps and triumphs, tries In wine drinkers again sitting casually working with magazines in the same spot on the pedestrian street where he used to tear the line at the time of Kalti and Oulu.

Ranta is disappointing in its novelty by sticking to only a reddish additional color instead of its great four-color coating. The color lyricism suffers, but the author wants to emphasize the depth of the mind.

When Ville Ranna’s previous album as well How I Conquered France (2021) dealt with the cartoonist’s life in an autobiographical way, I would like to find time again for other comic novel themes. The cartoonist side in question swallows Ranta, but how tightly.

Although a line is a samahko, caricatures and comic books are opposites of each other as works. In a topical drawing, the artist devotes himself to framing the currents of power hidden in a news event in a day or hours. The message of the comic book is worked on for two to three years.

Cruelly humorous How I Conquered France was stronger as a description of the draughtsman’s experience than Wine drinkers.

However, Ranta is such a high-level author’s voice that it is not worthwhile to push him with conflicting demands about the topics of future works. That’s what Lancelot, the infuriatingly sleazy publishing influencer of the French album, does.

Lancelot told Ranna, who was thirsty for international success: “The thing is, I absolutely trust your talent and ideas, Ville… But we at Huysmans want to publish universal stories! So! What does that mean? For example, your stories are often set in Finland… and Finland is not universal!”

The Helsinki comics festival will be held at Kaapelitehta on August 31–September 1, 2024, with Ville Ranta also performing.