Tommi Musturi’s ‘The Last Book of Hope’ Is Hopefully Not His Last Book

From Japan to Malmö and a little bit of Portland,

Tommi Musturi is a bit of an ambassador to Finnish comics – you can’t go far without seeing his name in a museum show, never mind bookshelves, posters, and of course, in the art of conversation. Based in Tampere just west of the Finnish capital Helsinki, Tommi’s been putting out a ton of comic books through Boing Being for about twenty years. He also runs Huuda Huuda comics publishing and has made a psychedelic splash with the Kutikuti comic collective, which is essential for underground Finnish comics if you’re new to the somewhat tucked away-slash-underground genre.
 
The Helsinki Comics Festival was once a local thing but is now the biggest comics fest in Scandinavia. Now in its 28th year, American comic queen Lilli Carré and Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte will be present. Also on the bill is Tommi, who will be launching the final book in his ongoing series, The Last Book of Hope. Tommi took some time out to talk about backpacking with zines in the 1990s, why he is fighting the Finnish school system for eliminating their art programs and why he feels like a geezer (even though he’s not).


 
VICE: So tell me, what’s The Last Book of Hope about?
Tommi Musturi: It’s the last and fifth book in The Books of Hope series. Each part can be read as an individual book but there’s a bigger storyline behind it, too. It’s still a very loose storyline as the whole series is an episode-based wholesome built out from small fragments that describe an ordinary life of a retired couple living on the countryside in south-middle-Finland. The story starts from the summer of the Chernobyl explosion and ends in the winter six months later. It deals with many things actually – ageing, life and death, with how in a relationship one defines the other, how humans are defined by nature around them and with the psychology of a Finnish male. I’m not really searching for any truths as such do not exist, but try to find the importance of a simple, quiet life. The last part in the series is sort of an epilogue that shows glimpses of what has happened earlier in the couple’s lives apart and together. It’s a happy ending in its full meaning.
 
You’ve been working on this series for eight years, which is quite a long time. What’s the magic in this story?
I’ve let the storyline float quite freely. I’ve left loads of space to ‘jam’ with the episodes as well, just having the bigger storyline as the guide for what’s happening. The story itself is actually based on an old couple that lived in the small village I’m from. They lived a very isolated life without kids in an old grey wooden house with 30 cats. I used to spy on them with my friends when we were kids. The husband was this huge bearded guy going around with his horse, and the wife was a tiny grey woman who laughed a lot. At one point the wife died suddenly for a reason I’ve forgot and the husband followed soon by dying in a car accident during a snowstorm.

The next summer the land of this dead couple was bought by some locals who brought down the house, cut down the trees and covered the whole place with asphalt. It was like these two people were wiped away from the world in a blink, having no relatives, no real friends who remembered them. Later, this couple came to my mind quite often and I wanted to do something based on them. The story of the book itself is fiction but the locations, environment and a lot of items I’ve drawn are from my childhood.

To me, your comics are colourful and outrageous. How is this one different from your previous comic books?
I haven’t had any specific style since my twenties. When I do have an idea that fits to be performed as a comic, I try to think of the best visual and narrative way to bring the message or story out to the reader. This is how the visuals of The Books of Hope and Walking With Samuel (my mute graphic novel) came about. I find experimenting with different equipment and techniques interesting. At some point in art school, I felt very bored with drawing. I had gone quite far in the way, I started when I was teenager and in the end I felt I was kind of repeating the visuals over and over again. As a following, I started to break my drawing into pieces by trying out different things, some I had hated or feared before. I’m still quite on that same way, still, though the projects I’m doing have gotten bigger and bigger. The sketchbook is still the most important tool I have.
 
You were a Helsinki-based comics artist and now you live in Tampere. Why the shift?
I’m actually a country-boy originally and I’ve lived in Helsinki for ten years. I’ve lived and studied in the north as well and went to continue in Helsinki finding myself soon doing this and that, having a job, building up collectives etc. I learned to tolerate Helsinki but I never felt that much home there. What kept me there so long was the Kutikuti Collective, which used to be a very tight bunch of friends doing things together.

I thought ten years in Helsinki’s Kallio was enough. It’s good to change things every now and then. I’m originally from quite close to Tampere and had lived there four times already in the 90s, having a lot of old friends there. When my girlfriend started to study fine arts there, it wasn’t that much of a big deal to move back. My Tampere is much more alternative and trashy compared to trendy and stylish Helsinki and I like it more. Kutikuti still exists mainly in Helsinki and I still work with them. It’s just couple of hours from here, so no big deal.
 
So are many artists moving to Tampere?
I think people come and go both ways quite a lot. Being the third biggest city in Finland, Tampere has quite a lot of artists but the scene itself is mainly in Helsinki. It doesn’t mean very much to me to be part of some scene. When it comes to comics, there are lots of artists living here and some of the most important independent publishers are based here. Tampere used to have one of the best comic stores in Europe during 1990s. Kukunor was the place where me and my entire generation of comic artists got our weekly dose from. That one store really created whole movement of independent art comics. One could find early L’Association and Amok works from that store and of course everything from Fantagraphics and D&Q. That’s an example that one small thing can really change something. What’s been happening here lately however, and in many other cities in Finland as well, is the decrease of art teaching. Since last spring, the Tampere University of Applied Sciences has decided to close the fine art study department. We’ve tried to fight against this, but there is a bigger trend of taking down cultural structures behind the whole thing. This in the name of ‘art doesn’t producing anything valuable’ – that’s the spirit of post-millennium Finland – the European capital of school-shootings.


 
What will you be doing at the Helsinki Comics Festival?
Hopefully not too much, actually, as last year was way too much action for me. It’s the main event for comics in Finland and quite a good festival indeed, so I intend to have fun as well. As it’s the main event for Finns, we’ll of course have lots of new publications out from my publishing house Huuda Huuda and Kutikuti collective as well. We’ll have a release club on Thursday with some bands etc. while at the festival fair there’ll be a big stand for HH and KK together. The Last Book of Hope will also be out there, which means some talking as well. The 28th edition carries some interesting guest from Joost Swarte to Lilli Carré so I’m looking forward to the event.
 
Why do you think the Finnish comics scene has such international resonance?
Well, I think that’s mainly because my generation of Finnish comic artists started to attend festivals around Europe in the late 1990s. We just packed our bags with some fanzines and went to show them at various events around Europe. Also, the movement in art comics in the mid-1990s, good anthologies, few active collectives and healthy competition between them has had an impact. This helped people to develope in the way they did. There weren’t any comic studies anywhere when I went to art school, which lead to most of my generation being self-taught. This caused a great variety of different personal styles. This all together gained some interest in Middle-Europe, France especially. After the millennium, many Finnish artists also established relationships with publishers outside of Finland. This has made our small but active scene visible to the world. However, there hasn’t been any really big movement since the 1990s in Finnish comics. I’ve been kind of waiting for that for a long time already.
 
When will The Last book of Hope be translated into English? I can’t wait to read it.
I don’t know. There isn’t anything planned yet. The fourth part hasn’t been translated into English either while the first three are out from Belgian independent publisher, Bries. My idea is to gather all five books into one big volume and try to get that published outside of Finland, as well. But maybe those small books won’t come out at all, we’ll see.

I’ll stay tuned! Thanks, Tommi!

The Helsinki Comics Festival will take place at and around Lasipalatsi Square in Helsinki, Finland on September 6–8.

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Previously – The Tropical Dystopian World of Timo Vaitinen