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Vice Blog

SCANDINAVIA -A PEEK AT LARS KRANTZ

Lars Krantz is one of those geeks you bullied all the way through high school for playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to heavy metal. Now he's turned out to be one of Sweden's most promising comic artists. Since Charles Burns is near and dear to his heart, he makes really scary pictures with one foot safely planted in reality and the other one in the grave. If you live in Scandinavia, you should pick up his debut comic album Dödvatten (Death Water) before the hype hits-–otherwise you'll be left without, standing alone like you just dropped your ice cream cone on the sidewalk. Here are some illustrations he did for us of Josef Fritzl, a series called Prisoner of Decay.

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VICE: Hi Lars. Explain yourself please.
Lars Krantz: The lack of words make it possible to interpret the pictures as you please, something I don't see as a bad thing. But if you want a hint, it's a simple story about how evil keeps repeating itself over and over.

What's your drawing history? You went to Comics College in Malmö, right?
When I was around seven, I started to trace from a magazine called MASK. I did it on greaseproof paper. When I got a little older, a friend of mine started to write a comic manuscript about a frogman called Larse Ono, which I illustrated. At 20 I went to art school and totally changed direction. I started to paint with oil instead. I thought about doing comics, but I believed you had to know computers to be able to do comics. After art school I was lost as to what to do next, and then a relationship ended. It all changed when an old friend asked me to illustrate his manuscript. The drawings turned out pretty shit, but I moved to Malmö and applied to comics school. And that's how it started.

And now you've just published a book.
It took about a year to finish the book, and it feels great to finally have something published. I feel like I threw away a lot of years doing nothing. I have to be really productive to compensate.

SAMUEL LILJEDORFF