Evil Dress

Evil Dress
By: Emilie Östergren
Language: Swedish/English
112 pages, color, hardcover
Sanatorium, 2009
ISBN: 978-91-976912-5-3









Wow! (and no, that's not the acronym for World of Warcraft, even though I might get back to that in a day or two. No, it is of course an exclamation meaning elation, wonder and excitement!)

I've known that Emelie Östergren's images were beautiful for a while now, and still I have had this book in my to-read pile for several months. Well, my loss! Emelie Östergren takes the reader for a ride in this surreal little book. The stories are full of big-nosed, weird looking, seemingly anxiety ridden little girls with big, voluptuous dresses who do the strangest things, often in total silence leaving it up to the reader to make sense of it all. Among others, Lewis Carrol is an obvious influence, with holes in the ground, in mattresses etc. often playing a vital part in the stories. But I don't care about the influences. This is unique and it hits me with the full force of an artistic temperament channeled through the media of comics. It could have been so stale and arty, and it is not. This is a Swedish artist showing that she is ready to conquer the world already in her book debut. A sign of this is the fact that everything in the book is printed both in Swedish and English, including the texts in all speech-balloons, something that feels a bit weird to start with, but soon works strangely well.

And the book is also beautiful, almost perfect with its heavy stock, off-white paper, somber dustcover, beautiful interior cover and so on. Sanatorium does it again! A book you just want to hold in your hands and never let go of.

So what are you waiting for? Go buy it! Now!