tom af brockbrock, whose real name is Tom Karlsson, is a Swedish comic artist known for short, fast-paced comics steeped in nihilistic humor and drawn mostly in black and white. He grew up in Linköping, Sweden, and is based on the island of Gotland. Alongside comics, he works in experimental animation and coding, and has worked part time as a librarian.
A discouraging interview kept him out of art school, leaving him with a lasting distaste for institutionalised creative education. He rarely accepts commissions and has taken a five-year break from comics, wary of burning out. His aim is to recover the innocent playfulness of the fast comics he made before becoming aware of his own skill. That growing self-consciousness, he says, turned him vain and self-critical. He produces his comics largely alone in a basement, mainly for his own amusement. The results drop readers into the middle of darkly funny, purgatorial scenes populated by landscapes that feel emptied of everything but a sense of unseen presence. Karlsson calls this fascination with randomness and the unknown a “beautiful occultism”. He generally avoids colour, working mostly in black and white in keeping with the underground comic tradition that informs his practice. He cites Robert Crumb and Hans Arnold, along with the magazine MAD, among his influences.
Karlsson published the book Stolle Bengtsson through Kolik förlag in 2006, intending it as the first instalment in a series. He closed the project after one volume, finding it increasingly hard to sustain the playfulness he had wanted from it. His work has also appeared in comic books and fanzines, and he has held small exhibitions in Sweden. He also sells signed prints of his work.
