Call for Submissions – CBA vol 56: UNCOMICS

CBA vol 56: Uncomics
Main Editor: Allan Haverholm
DEADLINE: Feb 20

UNCOMICS
Abstract art emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction to the complexities and — just as often — atrocities of modern society. Meanwhile, embedded in the entertainment industry, comics evolved primarily in terms of disposable spectacle or literary ambition; stylized pictures in service of story.

Comics scholar Jan Baetens noted a decade ago that narrative “melts in the air when [abstraction] walks in”. Living in a time of hyperlinked, multi-threaded and immersive narrative, we suggest instead that abstraction opens up to non-linear, ambiguous understandings of comics. Understandings so contradictory in terms that we need a new phrase to describe them — we give you: uncomics.

An artistic field where contemporary art and comics inform each other. Where the absence of sequence encourages the reader to investigate the picture plane(s) in any direction and order, becoming an active co-creator in the process. A space outside the tedious limitations of story where images both abstract and suggestive interact. Comics, at last, as a visual art form.

For inspiration:
Follow the hashtag #uncomics on Twitter, which will be used to post inspirational material.

CBA guest editor Allan Haverholm invites you to break the mold and unmake comics. To bridge the gap between comics and modern/contemporary art. Be bold, explore and dig deep!
Allan Haverholm is a graphic artist and comics researcher, former co-editor of CBA and host of the upcoming Uncomics Podcast.


—SUBMISSION GUIDELINES—
Please read and follow these guidelines:

Number of pages: We prefer comics that are about 5-30 pages, but any number is welcome.
Format: 20 x 26 cm
Color: Color / Black and white
Language: English
File format: .TIF
Resolution: 1200 dpi line art or 300 dpi CMYK
Length (texts): A good size for a text is ca 7500 characters (including spaces), but it can also be longer or shorter.
Bleed: 5mm. Think you know how to handle bleed? Read this to make sure you know what we mean.

Within this space, there are no limits.

Delivery: We prefer download links that do NOT require us to login anywhere (wetransfer usually works fine, for example).
Request: Please don’t use Comic Sans. We don’t like it and will ask you to change to another font.
And again; Please check our guidelines for bleed.

Please send us high-resolution files from the start.
Include a short presentation text* about yourself, with one URL (if you have a website or similar).
Please ask us if you are unsure about formats, resolution, bleed, etc. We prefer stupid questions to bad files. And there are no stupid questions!

Normally, we also organize a release exhibition showcasing sample pages from the new issue. Please let us know if you’re NOT ok with us using your works for that purpose. It’s part of our marketing and it usually takes place in a physical exhibition space, although these days we’re more likely to make a digital exhibition online at the Hybriden website, similar to what we did for CBA vol 52.

*Your presentation text should be approximately 500-700 characters in length. It should read more as an entertaining and informative bio and less as a CV. What you want to say about yourself is up to you, but it’s generally more interesting for our readers to know about your interests, who you are and what else you’ve published rather than where you’ve studied. We may edit it if needed to fit our format.

Send comics, questions, etc to: submissions(a)cbkcomics(.)com


What we are looking for is comics which rely on artistic ambitions and a will to experiment rather than what has been done a thousand times before. We want to expand the boundaries of what is possible to achieve in the comics medium. We are looking for the same thing in texts; articles, essays, exploratory texts, etc.

Unfortunately we cannot guarantee you any payment for participating (although these last few years we’ve had more financing so we have been able to pay at least something, i.e. when all the expenses have been paid we will share the surplus amongst the participants). If we publish your submission you will receive 10 free copies of the issue. That’s all we can promise at this date. Hopefully you will find being in CBA an enjoyable experience. Naturally, copyright for your material will stay in your hands.

Also note that we are constantly overworked and there’s a great risk that we won’t get in touch in case your submission doesn’t make it into the current volume (we WILL, however, let you know if we do publish your submission). We are sorry for this and will try to catch up as soon as things clear up (optimistically in 2025)…


Feel free to share this call by linking to this blogpost or inviting people to the Facebook event.

Subscribe and get 4 back-issues!

Postal fees are unfortunately going up a tad in Sweden next year and we will raise our subscription prices a bit to accommodate to the capitalist, privatized and misanthropic system that is PostNord.

So, to counteract that in our own way, we offer you a great deal!
Subscribe, renew or give a subscription as a gift and get 4 extra back-issues, for a total of 8 issues!

Before you checkout, make sure to peruse among our publications of CBA vol, and make your choice in the “Additional  information – Order Notes” in the cart and we’ll send them to you for free!

Note: CBA vol 1, 2 and 4 are out of stock and will not be reprinted.
This offer does not apply to our book-vol: 23, 25, 27, 29, 31 or 33.

This offer is also ongoing over at our shop, Hybriden, if you’re interested in checking out our other stuff as well!

 

CBA vol 53: PLACEHOLDER out now

CBA vol 53: Placeholder just came from the printer today!

Buy it HERE.

About the volume:
The pandemic was supposed to have a deadline, most of us agreed on a year. CBA deadlines are like the pandemic:we’re still open for submissions for the theme PLACEHOLDER. The world is paused for an indefinite time. What does this do to our experience of our existence? How do we replace our routines? We’re waiting, and in our wait, we imitate the “real” we hope will soon return. Like placeholders in our own lives.

Comics by: Aiden Kvarnström [SE], Tom Mortimer [UK], Saskia Gullstrand [SE], Adrián A. Astorgano [ES], Julia Nascimento [BR/SE], Nataniel E [SE], Mattias Elftorp [SE], Matt Carr [US], Kinga Dukaj [SE], Felipe Kolb Bernardes [BR/DE/SE], Ivana Filipović [RS/CA].
Text and illustrations: Mattias Elftorp [SE].
Cover & main editor: Leviathan [SE].

The perfect book to pass these socially distanced times with while you’re waiting out a pandemic that seems determined not to let us go on with our lives.

 

Comics for CBA vol 54|55

Reminder:

CBA vol 54|55: WAS IT A CAR OR A CAT I SAW?
Main Editor: Kinga Dukaj
NEW DEADLINE: OCTOBER 31

Clarification:
This is not a theme about dreams. We’re not after dreams specifically, just that feeling you can get when you don’t know if something is real or not. A very Lynchian feeling. More Twin Peaks season 4 than the depiction of a dream.

Have you ever just had to stop what you’re doing and go “wait, is this a dream?”
When the unknown starts bleeding into reality and you are forced to question your sanity, if just a little bit.
You know the sort of thing that happens in dreams that makes you sure it’s just a dream? How do you cope when it happens in the waking world?

In this theme we’ll explore the dreamy and the bizarre, the uncanny in the mundane, the creepy in the dark corners of everyday life. Magical realism with a twisted flair, comics that invoke a mystical, surreal, dreamlike state of mind, with a tinge of discomfort… Think of the movies by Lynch, for example…

Check the original post for detailed instructions.

CBA vol 50 in the Supertoon selection

CBA vol 50 was included in the official selection for the Supertoon animation & comics festival of 2021 (July 19-23).

We’re accompanied by some other CBK-related friends/artists, like Komikaze and Stripburger in the magazine selection and Radovan Popović and Igor Kordej in the book selection.

 

 

 

 

 

And of course the festival poster was made by Danijel Žeželj.

We won’t be at the festival, but a copy the book will be there!

CBA vol 50 is available at Hybriden, as is CBA subscriptions.

CBK presents:
BURNOUT
Digital release exhibition for the new CBA vol 52!

Where: hybriden.se/burnout
When: The exhibition starts Wednesday May 26 at 16:00
and will stay active for the foreseeable future
Buy the book: CBA vol 52

From hospital staff to comic creators to basically any job in the gig economy, burnout has become an increasingly normal part of everyday life for many of us since the term was getting widespread use in the late 1900s. Anyone who doesn’t have a steady income, or who is expected to do more work in less time than is reasonable, can feel it. So who or what is to blame? Could we create a situation, a systemic change, to avoid the conditions that cause burnout?
This volume of CBA explores BURNOUT. Not so much stories of depressing social realism, but rather artistic expressions of that feeling, suggestions for solutions, wishful thinking and visual abreactions. Expressions of rage rather than apathy, insurrection rather than complicity. Something to read for strength in times of austerity.

Exhibited artists:
Steve Nyberg [SE] | Mattias Elftorp [SE] | Henna Räsänen [FI] | Iso Sling Lindh [SE] | Tom Mortimer [UK] | Radovan Popović [RS] | Aleksandar Opačić [RS] | Manuel Rodriguez Navarro [DE] | Felipe Kolb Bernardes [BR/DE] | Korina Hunjak [HR] | Julia Nascimento [BR] | Aiden Kvarnström [SE] | Rasmus Gran [SE]
Exhibition organized by: Mattias Elftorp with Kinga Dukaj of CBK

The exhibition is presented with support from Malmö Kulturnämnd.

Call for submissions: PLACEHOLDER (new deadline)

Once again, we’re extending the deadline for CBA vol 53: PLACEHOLDER. We know things are hard in these times, so we want to give our artists a bit more space to work. The new deadline is July 15.

The pandemic was supposed to have a deadline, most of us agreed on a year. CBA deadlines are like the pandemic:we’re still open for submissions for the theme PLACEHOLDER. The world is paused for an indefinite time. What does this do to our experience of our existence? How do we replace our routines? We’re waiting, and in our wait, we imitate the “real” we hope will soon return. Like placeholders in our own lives.

Main editor: Caroline Ulvros/Leviathan

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
These are the basics for submissions. More info here.

Number of pages: We prefer comics that are about 5-30 pages, but any number is welcome.
Format: 20x26cm
Color: Color / Black and white
Language: English
File format: .TIF
Resolution: 1200 dpi line art or 300 dpi CMYK
Length (texts): A good size for a text is ca 7500 characters (including spaces), but it can also be longer or shorter.
Bleed: 5mm. Think you know how to handle bleed? Read this to make sure you know what we mean.
Within this space, there are no limits.

Delivery: We prefer download links that do NOT require us to login anywhere (wetransfer usually works fine, for example).
Request: Please don’t use Comic Sans. We don’t like it and will ask you to change to another font.
And again; Please check our guidelines for bleed.

Call for Submissions – CBA vol 54|55: WAS IT A CAR OR A CAT I SAW?

We’re looking for comic contributions and articles exploring the theme:

CBA vol 54|55: WAS IT A CAR OR A CAT I SAW?
Main Editor: Kinga Dukaj
DEADLINE: Sep 1 Oct 31

Have you ever just had to stop what you’re doing and go “wait, is this a dream?”
When the unknown starts bleeding into reality and you are forced to question your sanity, if just a little bit.
You know the sort of thing that happens in dreams that makes you sure it’s just a dream? How do you cope when it happens in the waking world?

In this theme we’ll explore the dreamy and the bizarre, the uncanny in the mundane, the creepy in the dark corners of everyday life. Magical realism with a twisted flair, comics that invoke a mystical, surreal, dreamlike state of mind, with a tinge of discomfort… Think of the movies by Lynch, for example…

—SUBMISSION GUIDELINES—
Please read and follow these guidelines:
-Number of pages: We prefer comics that are about 5-30 pages, but any number is welcome.
-Format: 20x26cm
-Color: Color / Black and white
-Language: English
-File format: .TIF
-Resolution: 1200 dpi line art or 300 dpi CMYK
-Length (texts): A good size for a text is ca 7500 characters (including spaces), but it can also be longer or shorter.
-Bleed: 5mm. Think you know how to handle bleed? Read this: (https://cbkcomics.com/bleed-explained/) to make sure you know what we mean.
-Within this space, there are no limits.
-Delivery: We prefer download links that do NOT require us to login anywhere (wetransfer usually works fine, for example).
-Request: Please don’t use Comic Sans. We don’t like it and will ask you to change to another font.
And again; Please check our guidelines for bleed.
Please send us high-resolution files from the start.
Please ask us if you are unsure about formats, resolution, bleed, etc. We prefer stupid questions to bad files. And there are no stupid questions!
Include a short presentation text about yourself, with one URL (if you have a website or similar).
Your presentation text should be approximately 500-700 characters in length. It should read more as an entertaining and informative bio and less as a CV. What you want to say about yourself is up to you, but it’s generally more interesting for our readers to know about your interests, who you are and what else you’ve published rather than where you’ve studied. We may edit it if needed to fit our format.
Send comics, questions, etc to: submissions(a)cbkcomics(.)com

What we are looking for is comics which rely on artistic ambitions and a will to experiment rather than what has been done a thousand times before. We want to expand the boundaries of what is possible to achieve in the comics medium. We are looking for the same thing in texts; articles, essays, exploratory texts, etc.
Unfortunately we cannot guarantee you any payment for participating (although this year we have more financing so we might be able to pay something for once). If we publish your submission you will receive 10 free copies of the issue. That’s all we can promise at this date. Hopefully you will find being in CBA an enjoyable experience. Naturally, copyright for your material will stay in your hands.
Also note that we are constantly overworked and there’s a great risk that we won’t get in touch in case your submission doesn’t make it into the current volume. We are sorry for this and will try to catch up as soon as things clear up (optimistically in 2023)…

Personally on CBA vol 47

Hey, it’s me, Mattias Elftorp of the CBK crew.

I’m not very good at bragging. Mostly I just tell people (= blog about, post some link somewhere) about things I’ve been involved in and hope for the best, but I’m going to give it a try here, because far too few people bought CBA vol 47 (buy it here) that I was the main editor of (which I know because I’ve seen the orders).

I’m not even marketing my own stuff here, mostly, and I don’t make any money from the sales, so it’s self-less bragging, really. I do this for you. So here goes:

One of the things I did make in this volume was the cover, and I’m really happy with it. It’s a combination of a linocut print, a scan of the plastic sheet I used to mix the paint when I did the print, the old circuitboard I scanned and used for Piracy is Liberation after finding it at the dump in Skellefteå in the 1990s, and maybe some other random structures I had lying around. The letters of the title are left-overs from someone’s (Kinga’s?) lino cut-outs for something. Anyway, I had fun doing it and think it worked pretty well as a cover.

The first comic, by Avi Heikkinen was the winner of the comics competition in Oulu where I was one of the judges (because I got the honorary prize the year before). I really liked how it’s look of photo-based drawings worked well with the story about a camera that can look into the past, and a film-maker who becomes obsessed with it.

Next up is a comic I wrote and compiled, based on a nightmare that Kinga Dukaj had, built out of one of my favorites of her artworks. It’s one of those dreams where you dream that you wake up but then realize you’re still in the dream, then you wake up but realize you’re still in a dream and so on. Layer by layer. Scary stuff that made for a scary story that fit really well with her photomanipulation of a tree growing out of a skull.

Then there’s Danijel Žeželj. Danijel fucking Žeželj, just to emphasize, because not enough people have seen his works. And a lot have, because he’s worked on X-men, Superman and a whole lot of other stuff, self-published and at big publishers. I first heard about him from the Stripburger crew when they were visiting Malmö in 2005 and talked about Stripburger in particular and Balkan comics in general. I saw Žeželj’s stuff and immediately fell in love! First time we published him in CBA was later that year, or maybe the year after. We distributed a few copies of his book Small Hands, which is sadly out of print now, I think, but it’s one of my favorite comics. Anyway, it’s always great to have his stuff in one of our books and you should check him out if you don’t already know his works.

After discovering Balkan comics, I found Komikaze, a Croatian web-based anthology, and in Komikaze I found a bunch of artists that we also published back in the day. One of which is now a friend of mine that I meet maybe once or twice year (pre-covid, when we could go to festivals), which is far too seldom; Radovan Popović. His art style here is based on chaotic paintings/collages, evocative and dark and beautiful. In this case a story connected to Philip K Dick, inspired by the Science/Fiction theme.

Another artist originating in the Balkans but living in Canada at the time is Ivana Filipović. I may be mistaken but I don’t think I found her but rather she found us. She sent a comic to the AltCom anthology of 2018, which she said was the first comic she made in about 20 years. A great honor and I’m glad she started again because I really like her stuff. Mostly straight-up drawings, and this is no different. She picked up on the religion-related part of the theme, with a fun/dystopic sci fi twist.

Korina Hunjak, another Balkan artist, but one that I’ve had less personal contact with, made this one. The ”where is the line between the living and the artificial” robot story is a classic, and one I often find interesting. This one is thematically reminiscent of the game Detroit: Become Human (which I replayed recently, by the way. Great game).

Francisco Sousa Lobo is a friend of a friend in Portugal. I have a couple of his books published by Portuguese comics network/publisher/association Chili Com Carne, and they’re always interesting, mostly low-key storytelling with simple lines that don’t necessarily betray the dark undertones of the stories. This one is no exception, and I think it’s a good sample of what he’s doing. You should check him out!

Last but not least, one of the founding members of CBK, Oskar Aspman, got inspired to make a new comic in his way that is often abstract in story, expressive in line-work, apocalyptic in mood. Always a pleasure.

And I also wrote a few illustrated text pieces, one about the construction of identity, one about something I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few years: how we seem to be living in an increasingly fictionalized world, in the post-truth era that former US president Trump is such a great champion for. It’s interesting and pretty frightening depending on the kind of dystopic fiction we often end up living in…

So that’s it. Maybe none of this sounds like something you’d like and then you should probably stay away. But if you’re anything like me and it sounds like something for you, give it a try (buy it here)! This is one of my favorite issues in recent years, and not just because I was so involved in putting it together, but because I think it’s really good!

By the way, if you want a wide variety of comics in style and content, why not get a subscription? It’s an extra good idea to get it now, before we will have to to raise the price due to increased postage costs. If you’re like me, you like things that are high-quality and low-price, so if you make sure you get your subscription before mid-April, you’ll get a better deal (not that it’s going to get super expensive after that, but still)!