Finnish art - Jope Pitkanen

Jorma "Jope" Pitkanen (b. 1947) is the true working hero of Finnish cartoonists: he has drawn more comics than almost anyone, anywhere. In 2003 it was calculated that since 1973 he had drawn over 30,000 comic strips. That's three strips a day on average, every single day, for thirty years.

With that kind of pace he could hardly afford to sit around looking for ideas, so he just went on drawing everything he saw around him. He lives in a rural town best known for its strawberries, so for the local paper, he did a strip about a strawberry farmer. It ran for 25 years. The next town over is mostly only notable as a major railroad junction. So for their paper, he did a strip about a man working at the railroad station. It ran for over 30 years. Combined, the two series run up to over 10,000 strips.

Jope's greatest genius has probably been in making many of his concepts extremely economical - that is to say, fast to draw. He did a strip about faceless bureaucracy where the main characters literally didn't have heads. He did another one about a drunken man who had fallen under a table in a restaurant: you only saw his feet from underneath the table.
His best-known strip (the only one of his to be syndicated, appearing at one point in about 20 papers) is probably Nakymaton Viananen, about a small-time farmer, who is so insignificant to the society that he has become actually invisible. You can only see his cap and the beer bottle which he is nearly always holding. Written in the regional dialect of eastern Finland, Viananen is sort of a Finnish combination of Andy Capp and Snuffy Smith, his main source of employment apparently being making moonshine.
Viananen ran as a daily strip from 1973 to 1993 (that's another 6000 strips to the pile) and has then continued in various formats in different magazines and Sunday papers.

Another main character of Jope's is Lempi, an old granny who lives in a small house that's just about to be torn down in Helsinki (usually depicted already being lifted away by a crane). This strip appeared in the national tabloid paper Ilta-Sanomat from 1980 to 2000. (So that's yet another five or six thousand strips).
The character also became the mascot of the Kemi comics festival (held up north on the Arctic Circle), appearing in the festival's posters, its award statuettes and even its custom-made beer labels.
Towards the end of the strip's run, the publisher was getting restless and asked Jope to "shake things up a little". So what did he do? The main character was an old lady, so he killed her off. For the last few years she appeared as an angel in a very strange version of heaven (which apparently involves a whole lot of drinking!).

Having produced such prodigious amounts of drawings, Jope understandably isn't very precious about them. So when I went to visit his studio, I got to go home with a whole bunch of them.
So here they are, a retrospective look at Jope's two most well-known strips, Lempi and Nakymaton Viananen.

There are 18 Pieces of Art In This Gallery.    

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There are 18 Pieces of Art In This Gallery.    

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