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Hi! I've been lurking the thread for several years now. Recently I ran into two Finnish comic/cartoon albums and thought it could be interesting to post them here. So here we go: B. Virtanen   B. Virtanen is a long-running comic strip created by Ilkka Heilä. Apparently the strip started in 1991. It tells about the life of the titular B. Virtanen (with Virtanen being a very generic, "boring" Finnish surname and B being a reference to a somewhat common way of referring good, productive employees/businesspeople as belonging in "class A", and failures or mediocre employees belonging in "class B".) The strip is very heavily built around Virtanen's job at Oy Firma Ab (essentially "Company Ltd") and how much his work there sucks. Many strips also deal with Virtanen's family life, which also sucks. I don't think I've ever read a comic strip that so relentlessly punches down on the protagonist and portrays their life as unending suffering, while also showcasing lots of really unpleasant cliches (this guy is a loser who hates his marriage! His wife is portrayed as a muscular person who threatens him! That kinda stuff.) I'll be posting this until I run out, but I'll stop if people find it too uninteresting or unpleasant. ANSU    Antero "Ansu" Halla drew a lot of small comics & cartoons for various Finnish magazines, starting from 1964 and lasting until at least the end of the 70s, although I'm not sure about the exact history here. The cartoons were also exhibited in multiple art exhibitions, and this particular album has received art awards. If you like the Man in Black or the Horse in Black, you'll probably appreciate the absurd visual humour of these; I'm a huge fan. I guess somehow Finnish cartoonists have a tendency for this kind of stuff? Hempuli fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 07:44
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B. Virtanen The office manager is called Mr. Nilkén. The name is a wordplay of the word "nilkki", which means something like "slimeball", "petty thief" or "scumbag". The surnameifized form is styled after Swedish surnames, and the reason for that is a jokey reference to stereotypes of Finnish-Swedish people. Finland used to belong to Sweden before becoming a part of Russia in 1809, and when Finland became independent, it opted to have two official languages, namely Finnish and Swedish. Due to historical reasons, Swedish families in Finland tended to be some of the wealthiest ones, and last I knew most of the richest families here still have very obviously Swedish surnames and so on. This, combined with the general perceived rivalry between Finland & Sweden, has led to a lot of stereotypes and such regarding Finnish-Swedish people, marking them as being "old money" or especially snobby, and coining phrases such as "svenskatalande bättre folk" ("Swedish-speaking better people".) I probably got my history here completely and embarrassingly wrong, but that's something of a summary as to why this specific slimy character is named as he is. (I'll try to give a little introduction to the main characters but they'll generally be much shorter than this because I really don't know much about this strip and don't really want to find out more.) ANSU   Johnny Walker posted:New comics, yay! I look forward to more. Especially the Ansu cartoons. That looks like my kind of stuff. 
Hempuli fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 18:16
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B. Virtanen :I ANSU  
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Jul 22, 2020 19:13
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B. Virtanen And here we have the CEO of Oy Yhtiö Ab. Not sure about their name. ANSU  
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Jul 23, 2020 18:15
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B. Virtanen The person in white shirt is Murikka (quite literally "boulder"), Virtanen's superior. I've been seeing strips of this comic for a *long* time and I still haven't figured out what the thing under his nose is meant to be. It looks like a moustache, except it's flesh-coloured and not separated from the rest of the face? ANSU  
Hempuli fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 16:00
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B. Virtanen Thanks for the viewpoints on Murikka's nose situation! I think the guess that his nose is broken is the correct one, on further thought, although I absolutely am still unable to see it as anything but a double nose, especially on panels where Murikka's mouth isn't drawn. Also thanks to whoever recommended not using timg! ANSU  
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Jul 25, 2020 18:40
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B. Virtanen The first strip here displays something I'm a bit confused about regarding the strip. I assume a large factor behind the strip is how #relatable it is due to the protagonist being stuck in soul-crushing office hellworld, kinda akin to Retail, but whereas Retail (and e.g. Tina's Groove) often shows relatability by making the protagonists react to annoying customers etc with their obvious obliviousness being the internal victory for the reader & protagonists, B. Virtanen seems very relentless in its hopelessness and punching-down. As a result it feels like the comic is a bit confused about how we're supposed to react to the misery Virtanen experiences all the time. ANSU    (All three fill an entire page; I really like how Ansu utilizes these white-on-black full-page images!)
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Jul 26, 2020 17:09
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Jul 27, 2020 15:32
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Jul 28, 2020 16:14
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Jul 29, 2020 16:15
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B. Virtanen That last strip really underlines some of the points I've mentioned earlier about this strip. :/ ANSU  
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Jul 30, 2020 16:35
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B. Virtanen ANSU   This is one of my favourites. So pretty!
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Jul 31, 2020 19:24
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Aug 1, 2020 16:41
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Aug 2, 2020 15:30
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Aug 3, 2020 16:37
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B. Virtanen ANSU  This one is possibly my favourite cartoon in the entire book. There's just something excellent in the minimalistic aburdity. 
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Aug 4, 2020 18:32
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B. Virtanen That third strip has probably actually been a valid logic for a lot people   ANSU   riderchop posted:i love Ansu, thanks for posting it Thanks a lot for saying that! I've been a bit unsure if people feel that Ansu's stuff is a bit too simplistic/nonsensical or somesuch.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:25
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B. Virtanen I apparently forgot one page from the consult saga. For miss Jantunen's name, here's some trivia. When we got to the point in Finland where people needed official surnames instead of the usual local identifiers, there was some work to invent unique (or uniqueish) surnames for families. Older families with existing Swedish surnames often translated their surname into Finnish, but for a lot of poorer folks the surname was just pulled out of thin air by taking some everyday noun and applying the ending "-nen" to the end. Thus we have names like Jokinen, Lahtinen, Järvinen (i.e. something like "Riversby, Baysby, Lakesby") which to a Finnish ear have a fairly distinct "generic" sound to them. For reasons I don't know "Juntunen" & "Jantunen" have become generic names for janitors/custodians, and I guess secretaries in this case. ANSU   Another one I really like, dunno why. Johnny Walker posted:I don't comment on it, but I've been enjoying it. Good nonsense is hard to find.
Hempuli fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Aug 7, 2020 |
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Aug 7, 2020 03:48
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His Divine Shadow posted:That consultat looks like Alexander Stubb, if it's on purpose it's really fitting. I assume the square glasses, haircut etc. are intended to create a stereotypical image of a modern, young entrepreneur, of the "innovations" type.
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Aug 7, 2020 09:51
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Aug 7, 2020 19:07
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Aug 7, 2020 20:20
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B. Virtanen ANSU   This one I've never quite understood. My best guess is the "owner resembles dog" joke, but eh, not sure about that...
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Aug 8, 2020 16:29
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Aug 9, 2020 16:01
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B. Virtanen It's not really common to use "sir" in Finnish; a more accurate translation would've been something like "nope, CEO" or "nope, leader". But tbh I don't think that many companies require that kind of adressing, either. The most common formal form of adressing someone is to use the plural You (te) instead of the singular you (sinä). ANSU  
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Aug 10, 2020 18:19
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Thanks for posting Man in Black! It was a joy to see. B. Virtanen  The last strip here was a bit tough to translate. The pun isn't super great in Finnish, but basically as follows: vuoden työntekijä = employee of the month työntekijä = employee (literally "doer of work") siivoustyö = cleaning work siivoustyöntekijä = "doer of cleaning work" viikon siivoustyöntekijä = cleaner of the week ANSU  
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Aug 11, 2020 16:08
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I request to see pics of any coffee bread baked! It'd be very cool to see that
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Aug 12, 2020 02:09
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B. Virtanen Behold! This is what I think to be the first set of strips where Virtanen is happy (without the joke being "I'm happy because I hate my job and marriage"). Afaik, people generally tend to spend about ~2 weeks worth of holidays during Summer for obvious reasons. Schoolkids also have a 2½ month summer holiday in all cases, so e.g. teachers have plenty of time off work during the Summer. (I hope these random tidbits aren't annoying.) ANSU  I hope this doesn't break tables too much; I generally try to cut wide pictures into sections to display vertically, but imo this one works really nicely this way and I'd prefer to retain that.  Ansu's cartoons have a lot of wholesomely-smiling old people.
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Aug 12, 2020 20:25
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Haifisch posted:Nothing breaks tables here anymore, because images automatically resize to fit whatever width the viewer's using.  The future is truly here! Thanks for telling me that!
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Aug 12, 2020 21:47
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B. Virtanen These Summer holiday strips turned out to be way tougher to translate than usually. Finnish summer cottages tend to have outhouses in them, and it's quite common to use the manure from outhouses to fertilize plants around the cottages. I used to visit a place where the indoors toilet was a dry outhouse, too; apart from manure shoveling it was actually very pleasant and very environmentally-friendly. The game "Mölkky" is a classic Finnish summer cottage pastime; in it you throw a wooden log (the mölkky) towards wooden cylinders with numbers on them and score as many points as the cylinders you topple over, unless you hit exactly one of them in which case you get points according to the number written on it. The unpredictable bouncing pattern of the mölkky & the fact that you need to hit exactly 50 points to win and drop to either 0 or 25 if you go over make it a very funny chaotic pastime, although I've noted that with larger player groups people tend to lose interest before everyone finishes. As for the last strip, the exact translation would be "I'll be in beach fitness" -> "this is not a fitness beach", kinda. I hope this version worked well enough. ANSU  
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Aug 13, 2020 16:45
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Yeah! Also, was that a prostitute across the hall that Pekka and Eeva saw yesterday? That was Taina, Heimo Suominen's ex-wife; note that Eeva mentions visiting her to tell the news.
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Aug 13, 2020 17:03
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Wow, I'm actually surprised at how quickly the junipers are making their return. I wonder how the ol' grandpa is feeling about this? B. Virtanen  Summer theatre is a relatively big thing in Finland; I think the tradition originates from Sweden (not sure though.) Usually "summer theatre" refers to outdoors amateur theatre heavily focused on musicals. I've been part of a group, it's a lot of fun! Also, Panel 1: Not X! Panel 2: Actually, X ANSU  
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Aug 14, 2020 19:35
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B. Virtanen ANSU  (Warning: curious nipples) 
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Aug 15, 2020 15:58
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readingatwork posted:I went and made the pullapitko bread: Ah, that looks excellent! You got the braids down really well. And yeah, cardamom is a really big part of the flavour. Great work! Pouring some... nib sugar, is it? on top is fairly common and turns into more of a sweet dessert. Thanks for the pics!
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Aug 16, 2020 05:38
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B. Virtanen ANSU  (Warning: humour about implied sexual assault)  Bummer about that. 
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Aug 16, 2020 17:12
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B. Virtanen Fingerpori alert! The Finnish saying "vääntää rautalangasta" ("twist something from iron wire") means basically explaining something in extremely simple terms to someone who otherwise wouldn't understand. ANSU (Warning: tits)  
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Aug 17, 2020 20:36
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I hope the young couple in Mämmilä gets to catch a break! I was kinda expecting there to be storylines about their marriage due to the initial unplanned pregnancy detail and such, but it's been nice to get the implication that all things considered they've been doing ok (before Isopaljo's trickery, that is.) B. Virtanen (Warning: racism)  Uh... I'm pretty sure the artist was going for a sarcastic angle, but I don't think the result really works in the comic's favour on many levels. Especially since this strip comes out of nowhere in-between a storyline. I wonder if there was some topical event that caused this to be drawn? ANSU  
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Aug 18, 2020 19:37
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B. Virtanen ANSU   I never got this one. 
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Aug 19, 2020 20:19
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Haifisch posted:idgi Those are contraceptive tools (internet tells me their English name is "intrauterine device (IUD)"?) and rabbits are famous for proliferating quickly. So basically rabbit safe sex education. Hempuli fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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Aug 19, 2020 21:36
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B. Virtanen For reasons I don't remember atm, a lot of Finnish buildings have had mold problems, especially larger buildings like schools. Over the years there's been a lot of publicity for cases where a school is evacuated once it has turned out that it has moldy structures that cause various problems for teachers and students alike. I went with "rotten" here because it felt like it'd convey the second part of the strip better. ANSU  
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Aug 20, 2020 20:03
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B. Virtanen ANSU  
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Aug 21, 2020 19:36
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