Spare Me by Disa Wallander

SPARE ME
Disa Wallander

Published by O Panda Gordo
16 pages - 17 x 28.5 cm - full colour digital printing - saddle stitched

Disa Wallander's work often deals with dark existential anxieties and deep philosophical questions with the same amount of eagerness and cynicism. It feels kind of hopeful and hopeless at the same time, but if it ever seems light hearted or vain, you're probably somehow missing its characteristic twisted irony.

SPARE ME is an abstract and exploratory reflection on the sweet paradoxes of human existence, especially the relation between the individual and the socially constructed world we live in. What does it take to be able to find joy in the things around us when we know that everything is a construction and that we all share the same impending doom? It won't give you the answers but you'll sure enjoy SPARE ME if you read it in the sun.

Disa Wallander’s latest zine Spare Me, published by Glasgow-based O Panda Gordo, is an attempt “to impart the overwhelming feeling of beauty in the world,” the Swedish illustrator tells It’s Nice That. “The theme of the comic is climate anxiety and an impending sense of doom that people in my generation have grow up with and not knowing whether you’re going to live to see some very drastic changes on the planet”. Made over a few weeks, the comic is the result of Disa’s urge to “to write something about sweetness mixed with my own dread about the future”.
Jyni Ong (It's Nice That)
If there’s a feeling of peace at becoming “one with nature” in these main images, the bare ink sketches passing by underneath undercut with hilariously bleak set-up/punchlines in the form of testaments about why they run: “I run to keep fit”/“Fit for a world of pain,” and “Mostly to keep the demons at bay”/“If I run fast enough, the emails will never catch up.” Both the characters in the margins and the main images
Tom Baker (Broken Frontier)