| The first comics festival of Kemi
took place 1981. The beginning was of very modest scale,
a seminar with 13 participants and a nationwide comics
competition with 27 participating artists. Since that the
annual Arctic Comics Festival of Kemi has gone a long way.
The comics competition attracts
nowdays regularly over 200 participants and since 1998 it
has been open for all comics makers in the five Nordic
countries. The amount of cash prizes is together 30 000
FIM, approximately 5 000 euro. The festival is well known
both nationally and internationally and is subsided by
both the city of Kemi and the Ministry of Education.
The list of the international guests of the
festival is long and impressive. Among them have been
artists from all continents exept Australia and Antarktis:
Claire
Bretecher, Pierre Christin, Robert Crumb, Joakim Pirinen, Hunt Emerson, Neil Gaiman, Jean van Hamme, Scott McCloud, José Muñoz, Frank Odoi,
Carlos
Sampayo, Gilbert Shelton, Bryan Talbot, Norio Yamanoi, Joe Sacco,
Jeff
Smith…
Kemi has presented also several times comics
from the minor comics markets of the world with artists
from countries like Albania, Hungary, Portugal and Russia.
Another part of the festival are exhibitions,
held usually in the Kemi Arts Museum in connection with
the event. Most popular of them was an exhibition of the
Finnish artist Tarmo
Koivisto, who's Mämmilä-exhibition
made 1995 an extensive tour in Finland. Already in Kemi
it collected 18 248 visitors, which is not bad for a city
of 24 122 inhabitants.
A major exhibition in Kemi was the French
exhibition The World According Robert Crumb in 1994. Cap
au Nord, the presentation of Nordic comics started it's
Nordic tour from Kemi in 1997. Kemi looks also abroad, in
1991 the festival was held on a travelling base in the
Russian city of Murmansk, where the exhibition of Finnish
comics attracted around 20 000 visitors.
The Arctic Comics Festival searchs actively
for the connections of comics with other art forms. The
programme always includes theater, dance, cinema or music
looking for the common ground with comics.
The City of Kemi is nowdays known as the
comics city of Finland. The city administration showed it's
lack of prejudicies already in 1986 when the city annual
report was published as a comics album. This was surely
the first time when an official administrative report was
a hit in the book stores. Since that comics has been used
several times in official city reports.
Behind the festival is The Arctic Comics
Center. This organisation publishes also comics and books
about comics. The annual album presents the winners of
the comics competition, but the real best seller has been
the first Finnish guide for making comics, Piirrä
sarjakuvaa (Ahlqvist-Kutila,
1988). Most ambitions project was the first encyclopedia
of the Finnish comics Suomalaisen sarjakuvan ensyklopedia
(Jokinen-Pulkkinen,
1996).
Kemin
sarjakuvakeskus - The Arctic Comics Center
Keskuspuistokatu 1, FIN - 94100 KEMI
Phone and fax: +358-16-221 000
Mobile phone +358-400 699 895
E-mail: heikki.porkola@kemi.fi
www.kemi.fi/~sarjis
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