The latest issue of Bamse features a definitive first for Bamse and friends: they travel to the future!

© Rune Andréasson

Lille Skutt accidentally makes Skalman’s time machine take a quantum leap into the unknown, and suddenly the three friends find themselves back home, but twenty years ahead of their own time. Their beautiful valley has been destroyed by a mysterious toxic catastrophe. Horrified and heartbroken, the trio goes back to the present to try to stop the catastrophe from happening and save the valley.

Mårten Melin and Susanne Adolfsson wrote this unusually scary and bold Bamse-story. I was delighted to be allowed to create both nightmarish scenes and exciting sneak-and-hide scenes in the chemical lab. Even the coloring artists seem to have picked up on the extraordinary qualities of the story, giving the toxic scenes dramatic skies and overlaying half-transparent veils of poisonous green.

As always, having Kerstin Hamberg as inker is pure luxury. My drawings wouldn’t look half as good without her professional lines, as you can see on these above sketches. Note the periodic system on the wall of the lab. Sometimes the perfectionist devil in me makes me do horrible things…