Jens K Styve
COMICS AND
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Dunce
My daily strip
DUNCE is a comic about a guy not totally unlike myself, trying to make it far up north, in Tromsø (Norway).
“I found Jens on Twitter a while back via his diary comics and immediately fell in love with his art style — in which I see a little Ralph Steadman and a little Quentin Blake. His simplistic character designs are deceptive and brimming over with life and vitality in a way that is surprising and deeply human.”
My comic Dunce has been running in Norwegian newspapers since January 2017.
The first four Dunce-collections are available in my webshop, see www.jensk.no. The fifth Dunce-zine will have a Kickstarter-campaign running winter/spring 2019.
Buy Dunce and other self-published comics at www.jensk.no
"Affectionate, heart-warming and most importantly funny (...) Made me laugh out loud, something comics rarely do"
Splank (Comics blog, UK)
"This book is an enrichment! Funny, hilarious."
Comicreview (German podcast)
"One of the smartest and most original Norwegian cartoons that has debuted in recent times."
Serienett.no (Norwegian comics blog)
"Like Watterson or Thompson, Styve’s simplified drawings are enhanced by his skillful use of traditional media."
Pome-mag.com
Dunce is available to read/follow here:
instagram.com/duncecomic
Cabin Fever
Painted in ink and coffee
A 28 page comic book about love, death and the ocean.
“(…) after buying Cabin Fever online on a whim, I have to admit wholeheartedly that not only is this dialogue free comic more than worth picking up, it’s one of the best things I have read all year!”
“Cabin Fever is gorgeous. Really beautiful. Jens has a really organic line, he’s one of those who blends cartoony with DARK really well. It looks fun, but has a foreboding of … Doom.”
That winter, an old punk song popped into my head and stayed for a while. I don’t know why, I hadn’t been listening to it for years. It was the song Cabin Fever by Nick Cave. Eventually, I searched it up, listened to the lyrics, and a story idea started to take shape. Later on, after reading a comic called Ink by Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, some visual ideas joined in with the story idea and it all turned into this comic.
Camera Obscura
A 24 hour comic
My result from Oslo 24H Challenge, 2015
“(...) subtle watercolours perfectly enhancing the story of photographer commissioned to take a portrait of Death, hinting at the fading sepia-tones of old photographs throughout.
(...) For me, Jens marks himself here as an accomplished storyteller, not least because of the limitations of the 24-hour challenge and the fact he has created something so perfectly well formed within that time, but for the deft way he handles the humour of the book, something not easy to pull off, but served up so naturally here. I’ll be rooting out more Jens K Styve, and I highly recommend you do the same at the first available opportunity.””
Buy Camera Obscura at www.jensk.no
Danse Macabre
Available from March 2016
Death summons representatives from all walks of life,
tempting them to dance along to the grave.
I've been thinking about this for a while: I want to do a comic book/zine that is non-linear, based most of all on the plain craft of drawing. The result is this little project called Danse Macabre, a 28 pages comic book, where Death travels geographically, back/forth in time, and between different layers of society. It's a celebration of human vitality and also (as the traditional Danse Macabre) a reminder of the fragility of life.
Read more in this blogpost or buy Danse Macabre at www.jensk.no