Cartoon Review | The two wild times of capitalism – today and yesterday – are described in Marko Turunen’s main work

Culture|Cartoon review

Comics

Marko Turunen: Kotola’s man and Loinen. Zum Teufel. 448 s.

Realism at least not included in surrealism Marko Turusen in cartoons. From the outside, they look like a fantasy populated by animal characters, space creatures, and other freaks, but they usually tell true events about Turunen’s personal history, often very mundane stuff.

Kotola’s man will start in 2017, when Turunen will move back to his hometown of Kotka after more than 20 years. The landscapes and especially the buildings have been drawn realistically. Kotola is the name of the new home.

Turunen (b. 1973) has long described himself as an Alien, a little childlike humanoid with a hole in his head. In the past, the character has also appeared as a Stranger. In Kotka, he meets Sylvin for a long time, with whom he starts a relationship.

In Pohja (2003) the injury shot hit Alien’s head. Since then, a hole has been waved in the character’s skull. The case is involved Kotolan man as an introduction. In reality, six-year-old Turunen hit his hip and not his head.

Sylvin Turunen, who is much taller than Alien, has dressed as a nun. Sylvi and Alien build their relationship and openly discuss sex, among other things. The stark contrast between the sensitivity of the scenes and the appearance of the people in them creates a strong atmosphere.

The most realistic character in the book is Turunen’s dog, a small blunt-nosed pug. Strange-looking little ones are commented on by acquaintances and strangers. When walking a dog, you will encounter a wide variety of people, including immigrants and other disadvantaged people.

Between the fragmentary scenes, there are photos from the Lihis Kotka blog, where Turunen publishes pictures of his dog. They bind dreamlike events to reality.

Kotola’s man ends when Alien receives a letter from the President’s Office. It may have been invented, but it acts as a transition to another part, the Loise, which dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There is a forge also Loisen the beginning where an alien arrives in Vehkalahti from the edge of space in 1888 as a child of a local family a bit like Superman from the planet Krypton to Kansas. Otherwise, the character’s life is based on Turunen’s grandfather’s life.

A stranger grows up like anyone else, participates in seal hunting, starts a family, ends up working in a sawmill, joins a labor movement, and squats through Marxin The capital, although I haven’t just attended school.

Turunen may have had to imagine the details of his ancestor’s life because not everything about an ordinary worker has been recorded. He builds on the story’s background in the history of the sawmill industry and the labor movement. Improving working conditions was not easy.

Over the course of the story, Finland becomes independent and drifts into a civil war. The stranger only meets a 17-year-old in Hamina after the war has just ended Urho Kekkonen. The case has been reported in the Monthly Supplement to Helsingin Sanomat in May 2018.

The snippets are rhythmic photos also build Loiselle connection to reality. The images are from the collections of the National Board of Antiquities. Turunen lists them and the graphs at the end of his book. There is also a list of books that Turunen has used as sources.

The list of sources reinforces the sense of realism in the story that is in place. The parasite doesn’t have as much fantasy as Kotola’s man, but neither of them has much background or explains his fragmentary scenes.

Unreal natural colors also create an unreal atmosphere, In the man of Kotola purple and In the parasite green. In some places, the images are so dark that it is difficult to figure them out. That, too, is probably a deliberate means of power that highlights an uncertain atmosphere.

Finally, in the last box, the great gentleman with a cylinder head says that the name Loinen refers to the wandering workers who often starved to death. In the light of the narrative, Loinen could also refer to the Lord himself, capitalist, or capitalism as a whole, even if the bourgeois denies interpretation.

Parts of the book tune the tension between the two eras. One hundred years ago, exploitative capitalism was even somehow incited as equitable and humane.

Although Turunen approaches modernity mostly personally and not through the economy, it is remembered that in recent decades capitalism has once again broken its shackles and raged wildly from one collapse to another.

The period of regulation of capitalism seems to have been short. There are more and more poor and sore people again.

Turunen did his main work for several years. In the otherwise exceptionally handsome autumn season of Finnish comics, it is the second masterpiece of one of the most significant artists in the field. The previous one was Matti Hagelbergin Fat.

The cartoons of Turunen and Hagelberg are different, but they also have something in common. Both have long built their own worlds, of which different works can be seen. Both deal with reality by moving it away in a very original way.