Martin Kellerman's Rocky Now Available In English
Rocky is a comic strip drawn by Martin Kellerman and is, according to me, the best comic ever in the history of the universe. Maybe this is because I don't really read comics, but it is still worth checking out (if you have the proper sense of humor) and live in Sweden. But wait, what's this? Yes, now non-Swedish speakers can enjoy the tragic exploits of Rocky because Volume One is now available in English.
Like most people in Stockholm I have a pre-Rocky life, and a post-Rocky life. The pre-Rocky (before 1998) life consisted of not having a single funny comic strip to read on the bus on the way to work. The post-Rocky life consisted of having one that actually related to Stockholm life available to me everday in the free paper Metro. Now it consists of having 9 volumes of Rocky on my bookshelf.
As the story goes, Martin Kellerman had just been dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his job and was living in his parent's home with his brother in a Stockholm suburb when he started drawing Rocky. It reflected his situation, and many other's. He sent a bunch of the strips to Metro, who not only accepted them, but started publishing them the next day. Since then many of us have gotten to be quite familar with Rocky, and he has added the humor that was lacking in Stockholm life. It's difficult to describe exactly what that means, best put it means that finally you had something telling you it was ok to laugh at the fact that it's nearly impossible to find a job or an apartment here, and that the weather certainly isn't something to write home about.
For those of us who did not know Swedish, we learned quite a bit from Rocky. Maybe not the best way to learn a foreign language, but certainly one of the more entertaining alternatives to August Strindberg. And I guess on a personal level, Rocky sort of reflected the American humor that I occasionally missed, something I dub "swebonics". It is a comic strip that really could work anywhere in the world, but we were lucky to get it here in Sweden.
Rocky is no longer in Metro, it has been replaced by inferior comics in my opinion. It is now published in a couple of other papers in Stockholm and has also been turned into a play.
As I mentioned, Rocky is now available in English. You can get Rocky Vol. 1 The Big Payback atFantagraphics.com and also at this Amazon page. You can also find the English version here in Sweden in most bookstores. I haven't read that many of the translations, but I imagine that most of the humor makes the transition pretty well. The setting is still Stockholm, they haven't moved Rocky to New York or anything. I'll have to pick up a copy, it'll be interesting to see how they've adapted things.
More information can be found in English at Rocky-Digital.com, the whole story and some of the translated strips can be found here. More in Swedish can be found here. At the Swedish site you can read almost 500 older strips on-line. You can also read Rocky daily at Dagens Nyheter's site.
If you haven't discovered the world of Rocky yet, do yourself a favor and check it out.
K. Panda
