Author: digicomixoy

Categories
Alt Text Included Autobiographical comics Comics

Finnish spring and folklores

This comic is my lovesong to the Finnish spring. Or a hate song? Love-hate-song? I don’t even know, I think me and Finnish spring have a bit of a toxic relationship.

This comic was actually made a couple of years back, because this spring has been way easier and more straightforward!

Beginning of May H-P looks at the sun yelling happily "Spring! Finally it's time to bring my plants outside!"
Next day H-P stands outside with a plant. The air is grey and it's snowing. H-P looks defeated.
End of May H-P looks at the sun very excited! He yells: "Ok, Spring! Now this must be it! It's so warm! Time to bring the plants out!
Next day The air is even more grey than before and it's snowing very heavily. H-P is holding a plant and looks defeated.
April, literally yesterday!!! The sun is shining, H-P is looking at the weather with his phone and his laptop! He says: "I've checked the weather, air humidity, rain charts... it should be good? Spring? Time to put the plants out.
Today An actual photo taken from H-P's window. There's snow. H-P's drawing on top of the photo. H-P now has the plant growing from his head and he looks depressed and defeated. He says "Why must you torment me like this, Finland?"

Also as a non-english speaker I have to point out, do you see how in my comic May comes before April? Yeah… about that. I was meant to say March, but I always forget March is the third month. March sounds like Marraskuu to me, and Marraskuu in Finnish is the November! Here are the months in their respective order in Finnish (with literal tarnalations in english in brackets) for those who are interested in this kind of useless information:

Tammikuu (central moon)
Helmikuu (pearl moon)
Maaliskuu (earthly moon)
Huhtikuu (burn-clearing moon)
Toukokuu (spring field work moon)
Kesäkuu (summer moon)
Heinäkuu (hay moon)
Elokuu (living moon)
Syyskuu (autumn moon)
Lokakuu (dirty moon)
Marraskuu (death moon)
Joulukuu (yule/christmas moon)

See how all the month names describe the month some way? Either the work done on a farm that month or what the month looks like! Fun fact, tammi, as in January, Tammikuu, also means oak. But in this case tammi doesn’t come from that meaning, but from the meaning of a central pole that was believed to hold up the sky and make it rotate in Finnish folklore (taivaantammi). I’m pretty sure oak also got it’s name from that central pole. After all oaks are very sturdy, big and beautiful trees that could be imagined as the pole that holds up the sky!

Yet again, huge thank you to my Patreon backers who make free comics like this possible. You’re the best!

Categories
Comics No Buy Year -comics

No Buy Year 2022, part 2!

Have you already read the first part of this comic? (The part of my no buy challenge that goes from January to February!)

So March was by far the hardest month, because I collect indie queer zines and I love supporting other artists. But I survived! Here’s a comic from March so you know what I mean.

Find these people on Instagram.

So here’s the thing, I think I have a very bad case of hunter-gatherer brain. That is a totally legit (not legit) medical condition that makes me want to hunt for stuff and gather it around me. Shopping is a good medicine for this, but it’s very expensive and unsustainable. So I have resorted to other solutions, such as dumpster diving!

And now you must be thinking, what about April?

Here’s a fun fact, I’m actually writing this blog post right after finishing the last part of the sociology entrance exam course! Now I just have to wait to get the last grades and see if I can get in to the final exam. And if I nail that… Turku University, here I come! Let’s keep our fingers crossed. (Though I am slightly worried what starting in a University would do to my no buy year… there’s an awfully lot of buying involved in education!)

Today is already the 19th of May, so this month will end soon! I draw the previous month’s comic during the first 10 days if the next month, meaning, the comic about May will probably be ready some time around 10th of June. But if you absolutely can’t wait, here’s some spoilers.

I have finally been able to start gardening! That is very helpful in not buying stuff, because you have your hands full! The garden plot I have isn’t just mine, it belongs to a small nonprofit organization called Maan Satama ry. We have bought one thing for the plot, but I’ll tell more about that in the next comic. (I have to also mention, that I’m the chairman of Finnish Comics Society, which is an organization that employs several people and they all probably buy a ton of stuff for the organization all the time. Does that count as my consuming? I’d say no.)

I have also been able to start foraging for wild plants! I mentioned my hunter-gatherer brain. Foraging for wild plants is like the best therapy for that condition! I absolutely love roaming around trying to find more and more edible plants. Also, here’s my tip for people who haven’t tried foraging but would like to try. Pick one plant that you find easy to recognize (and that is edible) and just go search for that. When you are so used to it that you can recognize it in your sleep, choose another one to add to your repertoire. In my first year of foraging I basically just picked stinging nettle and common yarrow. Next year I added in more plants! Now I forage quite a lot of different species, but I still try out new plants. Many of them taste like crap though, so I don’t continue with them.

But foraging! How’s that for no buy challenge! You can even supplement some of the food you’d have to buy with free things!

Edit: Here’s a link to the next post in this series for easier viewing. Read part 3 here!

Categories
Alt Text Included Comics Sustainability comics

Foraging for wild plants, what, how and where?

Summer is approaching very fast! (Well, depends where you live. Maybe where you are the summer has already arrived.) What summer means to me is foraging wild plants! I use a large variety of wild plants for food, seasoning and even medicine! But storing the herbs can get hard. Especially because we live in an apartment building! That means we just don’t have enough space in our freezer (even if we have a separate chest freezer). I have solved that problem by storing most of our herbs by drying them instead of freezing! Here’s a comic that shows you perfectly how my house is filled with herbs all summer long! (Psst, after the comic I’ll give you a list of my favorite wild plants that we go foraging for and what I use them for.)

Watercolor artwork of H-P surrounded with herbs from foraging trip. Text says "Where am I drying herbs?"
Photo of a table with a TV on it. In front of the TV there's a paper with basil leaves on it. There's also 4 jars of already dried herbs next to it. A text on the image says: There's perfectly good space in front of the tv! You can''t even put plants there to cover the TV screen.
Photo of the small space that's above the fridge and below the highedt cupboard. There's a metal net that has some leaves on it. Text says: There's that awkward space above the fridge! Perfect for drying herbs. Why not use a herb dryer though, you may ask. Because it uses electricity. If I can dry them without any more resources, I'll do it.
Picture of a kitchen table that has absolutely no space for eating, because there's foraged herbs on sheets of paper! Text: If there's too much herbs I have to leave them on the kitchen table too.
Picture of a window. There's nails on top of the window and herbs hanging on strings from the nails. Text: I also hang them from these nails above the kitchen window! This dries them fastest because the more air they have around them, the faster they dry!
Photo of a plate with herbs on top of kitchen cupboards. Text: We have some weird space above the kitchen capinets. Too high to use for anything else than drying herbs! I just use a newspaper under them and try to space them out so that they don't touch each other.
Photo of some foraged clover flowers on top of a paper that's on top of a bookshelf. Text: And if I absolutely run out of space, I put them on top of any furniture, like this bookshelf.
Here's a closeup of the herbs that were in front of the tv. Text: Wanna hear more about my life? I have a tier on my patreon where I post autobiographical comics you can't see elsewhere! patreon.com/hplehkonen

I think now’s the time to give you a link to my Patreon.

The wild plants we forage the most!

Here’s a list! (Finnish name in brackets)

  1. Stinging nettle (nokkonen)
    We use a lot of stinging nettle! It’s nutricious and can be used like spinach! We especially make salty pancakes (crepes?) with it. We eat those with lingonberry jam! It can be used for mutliple things, like tea, but because there’s a lot of plants that are basically only good for tea, we don’t really waste stinging nettle for tea.
  2. Rosebay willowherb (Maitohorsma)
    We collect the young leaves before the plant flowers and we prepare them by first withering the leaves and then rolling them and then fermenting them a bit before drying it. This technique is used for some of the best teas in the world and it works amazingly well with rosebay willowherb leaves! It’s called hiostaminen in Finnish.
  3. Goutweed (vuohenputki)
    We only collect this early in the spring, when basically nothing else grows yet. That also makes it easy to spot. It’s the only thing that grows! We either eat it fresh as a salad or we use the same preparing method as willowherb to make it into tea!
  4. Common yarrow (siankärsämö)
    We gather the young leaves and just dry them. They are a very good seasoning for casseroles!
  5. Meadowsweet (mesiangervo)
    We gather meadowsweet leaves for tea and ferment them the same way we did with willowherb, but there’s more to meadowsweet! We also collect the flowers and dry them. They have some pain relieving substances in them, so when I start getting a headache, I just make myself a meadowsweet tea. Despite it’s sweet name, the tea with the flowers tastes absolutely disgusting (the leaves taste better), but it heals my headache! I also use this as a flu remedy, though then I put in other things too… Some for getting it to taste better, some to make it more effective.
  6. Dandelion (voikukka)
    Dandelion roots are wonderful in a vegetable casserole! But they’re a pain in the ass to dig out and even more of a pain to clean, so we don’t use them often despite me loving their taste. But if you do gardening and you have to dig them out anyways, don’t throw them away! Eat them! (They work well in a blended vegetable soup too!)

I think that’s all the ones we use a lot… and dandelion that I’d love to use more, but I’m lazy. Besides these we use a variety of other plants too, but not as much. Here’s some more of them: rowan leaves (pihlaja), ground-ivy (maahumala), clover (apila), juniper (kataja) and spruce (kuusi). There was some more too, but the translating site I used didn’t have translations for them. Also this doesn’t include wild mushrooms or berries we pick when we go foraging.

Want to learn more about foraging? Or something else?

If you’re interested in learning more about foraging in Finland, just ask! I’m always open for new comic ideas. It’s way easier for me to know what kind of stuff you want to see if you just tell me directly. Also if you’re interested in reading more about the foods we prepare at home, here’s a link to my previous post about kombucha!

Ps. This comic was brought to you by my Patreon backers! Yes, they pay to get access to some exclusive materials on Patreon BUT they also make it possible for me to use less time to uphold capitalism and more time to do educational comics and posts like this for free! Big thank you to all my Patreon backers!

Categories
Comics No Buy Year -comics

No Buy Year 2022

The thought of not buying anything new for a year started forming in my head somewhere around October 2021. I had just purchaded a felt hat I had wanted for ages. It was pretty expensive for a low income person such as myself, but I had saved up for it. I started counting all the things I had bought in a year and it wasn’t much. Would I be able to go for a year without buying anything? I made the decision to do a No Buy Year in 2022 in late December and immediately made this comic, so there’s no turning back!

Now that I’m writing this blog post it’s already May of 2022 and I have managed not to buy anything for 4½ months. It hasn’t really been that difficult and I have even managed to make comics about the process on the go!

No Buy Year begins, January feelings

In early February I made a longer comic that detailed more things I did in January.

In January I was worried I’d suddenly start cheating by buying more of the things I am allowing myself, but that was a weird fear for me to have. I had been buying very little things in the earlier years too! Why would I start buying things now?

In January I also didn’t yet really know what I wanted to do with my comics on the matter, but next year my ideas were clearer!

February and digital goods?

So how about March? Well, you either have to go read the comic on my Instagram right now or wait a bit so that I post the next batch of no buy year -comics here on my blog. This post is already getting pretty long as it is, so I’m going to spread the comics from January to April between two blog posts. After that I will be updating my blog alongside with my social media.

Oh and if you read Finnish, I suggest you go read the whole thing on maansatama.com blog! The same comics are available there in Finnish!

Categories
Comics Other comics

Which plant parent are you?

With this handy comic you can test which type of a plant parent you are! All the plant parents from trash goblin to succulent ho are welcome here… even the grim reaper. Let’s get into the comic right away.

I’m personally a trash goblin for sure! I don’t even know where majority of my plants are from when I haven’t bought plants in years. I think my other partner Paju has bought some though… And Sara’s parents have brought me a ton! As a plant parent my mom is the grim reaper, good thing she’s not like that as a human parent or I’d be screwed!

This might be one of my most popular comics?

Did you know that I originally posted this comic on my Instagram and it became so popular, that boredpanda made a featured article of it? That was nice!

I’m generally not against people sharing my art if they
a) don’t crop out my details
b) ask me if it’s okay
c) leave links to my social medias and my website
So if you find something you’d like to share elsewhere, just ask! Oh, and if you have a blog related to sustainability and you’d like to use a panel from my comic as an illustration for it, ask me! For smaller blogs I’ll totally let you use them for free if you credit me well. Bigger blogs and websites do need to pay me for my work, I’m not here to get exploited after all. But to me it’s so important that the message of sustainability goes forward, so I’m definitely ready to help other bloggers who might not be into illustrating to get their message accross!

Almost forgot to mention! This comic is colored by my wonderful boyfriend Paju Ruotsalainen!

By the way, now that you’re here looking at one of my most popular comics, I’d like to suggest that you look at the probably weirdest comic I’ve made. It’s called Millenials Kill. It’s an anti-capitalist queer mob-thriller parody! Sounds awesome, right?

Categories
Alt Text Included Autobiographical comics Comics

Kombucha season has begun! (Sara seems happy)

I don’t know if you’ve ever made kombucha during winter, but here’s the problem with that. We save energy, so our home isn’t super warm during winter. We just put more clothes on if we get cold! But our scoby, the weird lump of bacteria that makes the delicious tea, can’t put on more clothes! So making the kombucha takes ages! During summer when it’s warm inside and outside it’s way faster to make it!

My other partner Sara is very pleased with summer. She gets to have homemade kombucha every week and she also gets to eat all kinds of foods made from Finnish wild plants! Yesterday we ate stinging nettle pancakes (with lingonberry jam)! Spring and summer really are the best time for foragers.

Speaking of kombucha, here’s a comic about the first time I gave it to my friend Eelis. This comic is colored by Sara, my partner! Go check out Sara’s website too!

H-P holding a jar, Eelis sitting behind a table. Title: Eelis the Kombucha Boy. H-P: Wanna try out kombucha? It's self made. Eelis: Sure!
Eelis takes a sip and his face turns red. A lightning flashes behind him. He is sweating like a pig and he looks very uncomfortable.
Eelis turns green. He is half smiling as he looks in the kombucha glass. He's shaking a little.
Eelis looks like he ate a lemon and his face is trying to suck itself inside his skull. Now he's blue and he's sweating more than ever and shaking violently.
H-P Offers a jar with a kombucha scoby in it to Eelis, saying: Want a scoby so you can make your own? Eelis bangs his fists on the table and he looks excited and deligtes. He has flames in his eyes signifying the intense excitement. He yells: YEAS PLEASE!

If you’re interested in knowing what else do I do in my daily life, I suggest you go browse more of my comics here on my blog!

Ps. If you want to know what’s happening in my art, join my mailing list! No spam, just one email every other month letting you know what I do, so that social media algorithm can’t hide it from you.

Categories
Alt Text Included Autobiographical comics Comics

First blog post, how did I become a cartoonist?

Okay so this blog post is basically here just so I can check if the blog looks good. But posting a blog post just for that would be boring right? So if you’re a true fan and you actually went and read this, here’s a comic about me becoming a cartoonist for you! Thank you for being here!

This is a story on how I decided to become a cartoonist. I was young, I met a friend who was obsessed with comics and always ready to stroke my ego if I drew them. Wonderful times!

Title: Why did I start making comics? Tiny 16 year old H-P, a nerd with glasses and long hair, sits by a table with a red haired girl. H-P is drawing an alien with very large eyes. Hardly a professional cartoonist level, but pretty good. A blonde girl approaches saying "Oh!"
The blonde girl says "I see, you draw manga too! Nice!" H-P looks at the blonde girl just saying "Thanks!"
The blonde girl leaves, H-P whispers to his ginger friend "What is a manga?" The text at the bottom says: "That's how I met Raakel! My future bestie."
Illustration of H-P listening to the blonde girl, Raakel, explaining something. H-P sighs "Wow!" Text: Raakel loved comics and she would go on and on about then. And I would listen! I loved it! And she never made me feel myself stupid for not knowing as much about comics as she did. She was just happy to help me learn!
Illustration of H-P drawing a comic, he's becoming a cartoonist now. Raakel looks at H-P's art saying "Let me see." H-P replies "Wait." Text: After hearing so much about comics (and reading a lot of manga Raakel recommended), I got inspired to draw them too! After all, I already loved drawing!
Illustration of Raakel reading a comic saying "When will you draw more again?" H-P smiles, he looks very happy with himself, he replies "Soon." Text: It was the first time in my life someone was so genuinely interested in seeing what I had created!
Illustration of H-P, now a grown man and a professional cartoonist, relaxing on a couch saying: "I guess that's why I still make comics. Comics were the first thing I had ever made that someone else sincerely appreciated. That's how Raakel got me hooked."

Years later I still think of how important Raakel’s support was to me. And we’re still friends to this day! Actually, right now Raakel is translating my partner Sara’s polyamory comic to english for the new book that’s coming out soon!

If you’re interested in learning more about my life and comics, I suggest you go browse through the different tags here on my blog! For example, this one is an autobiographical comic, so the Autobiographical comics -tag has more of similar content! This comic also has Alt texts so the comic can be read with a screen reader. Not all of the comics on my blog have that yet, mainly because they’re a lot of work to make on top of the actual comics and I’m just a one person, but I’m working on them! Here’s the Alt Text Included -tag so you can read all the ones with the Alt text!

If you want to help me have more time to work on the alt texts and everything else I have on my website, please consider supporting me on Patreon!