Kellerman's ROCKY launches in METRO
By Leroy Douresseaux
July 29, 2006 - 14:58
THE DAILY, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMIC STRIP "ROCKY" BY SWEDISH CARTOONIST MARTIN KELLERMAN STARTS UP IN METRO USA
On Monday July, 17 the New York and Boston editions of daily free
newspaper Metro -- "The World's Largest Global Newspaper" --
presented a different kind of daily comic strip: Martin Kellerman’s
ROCKY.
Kellerman’s Rocky is one of the most acclaimed new comic strips to
emerge in the last decade. Being autobiographical, the themes and
humor of Kellerman’s comic strip are closer to TV series like
"Seinfeld" and "Friends" than the more traditional and bland comic
strips running in most American newspapers.
Kellerman has also used his character to do unique comics interviews
with some of the biggest names in the music industry, like 50 Cent,
The Game, and Pharell, and some of Kellerman’s personal favorites
like Slick Rick, M.I.A, and Arctic Monkeys. A number of these
interviews have been published in American/international magazines
like YRB and Vice.
Rocky has been running daily in Europe since 1998. Today the daily
strips, and the weekly and monthly full pages of Rocky run in some 40
newspapers and magazines in 8 countries. In Sweden and Norway, Rocky also has its own monthly magazine.
The first English-language Rocky book The Big Payback was published
by the well-respected Fantagraphics Books in the USA in November
2005, with the second volume scheduled for Spring 2007. The Rocky
books are also published in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and
Italy; plus France and Spain later this year.
This autumn work on a 3-D animated Rocky TV series begins, with a
full length animated film to follow. Kellerman is both writer and
director of these projects.
What will probably be amazing to American readers is how similar the
day-to-day experiences of these Seinfeld-watching, Big Mac-eating,
hip-hop-listening Swedes is to theirs. Rocky is a reminder as to how
utterly global our culture has become - and a reminder that laughter
is truly universal.