Small Press Expo has announced Danish International Special Guests for SPX 2019. The festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, September 14-15, at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center and will have over 650 creators, 280 exhibitor tables, over 20 programming slots, and additional hands-on workshops to introduce attendees to the amazing world of independent and small press comics. Additional Special Guests will be announced soon.

Craig Frank was born (1961) in St. Louis, Missouri. In his early years he had various jobs that helped form his character, among them, a gardener at a retired Nun convent, an asst. to an alcoholic carpenter, a trash collector in a ghetto north of St. Louis, a bellman in the Adolphus Hotel and a printer at a chemical infested T-Shirt Factory. He graduated from Columbia College with a Cum Laude in BFA. A multi-talented artist, Craig moved to Denmark in the late 80’s and later joined the world of animation and directed his debut film Journey to Saturn, and created his debut Graphic Novel, JFK Secret Ops. 

Craig Frank has created the graphic novel COOL VALLEY, a coming of age story set in the 70’s in a small town outside St. Louis. As one reader wrote: I read it without stopping and laughed many times; it kept me wanting more of both our pasts.

Emil Friis Ernst (b. 1994) is a danish cartoonist, illustrator and comics teacher living and working in Viborg, Denmark. He has previously had journalistic comics work published on The Nib and exhibited at Erlangen International Comic Salon. 

He’s into big robots and cinema from around the world. 

Emil’s forthcoming books “Dr. Murder and the Island of Death” and “Reservat” (the latter written in collaboration with Dennis Gade Kofod) are equal parts spandex-clad pulp and dystopia, dealing with loss and longing in a world on the brink of destruction.

Halfdan Pisket‘s graphic novel debut, the highly acclaimed Cockroach Trilogy (2014-2016) has been applauded by the pressand awarded numerous prizes.

“My father’s story is similar to so many others, who travel away in an attempt to put the past behind them, but who eventually fall apart in the new country.”

The Cockroach Trilogy is about the life of Pisket’s father, an Armenian immigrant escaping opression and trying to make himself a new home in Denmark. It is a story about not belonging anywhere and about losing everything. The trilogy is heavy awarded and sold for publication in The Netherlands (SubQ), France (Présque Lune), Sweden (Kartago) and Mexico (La Cifra editorial). Recently the French edition of the last volume of the trilogy won Série de la Prix Angoulême in France.

Ida Rørholm Davidsen is a Danish illustrator educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Design in Copenhagen. Ida works independently with illustration, art and book projects, besides being part of the design collective and shop GunGun. Her drawing style is light and feminine, and mixes the analogue pen drawings with digital pastel colouring.

Ida Rørholm Davidsen won the Ping prize (the official comic award in Denmark) for “Best young-adult comic” 2019. for her comic debut: Lonely journey.

Lonely journey is a a modern fairytale about the young girl Anna, her obsession with computer games, her loneliness and the every day struggle to fit in.

John Kenn Mortensen says “It warms my heart when I am able to scare people or just give them the sense of having experienced a small adventure from something so simple as a drawing on a post-it note. People will always be afraid of monsters. For some people spiders are monsters… just very small monsters.

There is this very fine moment right before you realize you are gonna be eaten by something you never thought existed. It is like when you get bad news and you think ‘I never thought this was gonna happen to me.'”

From dinosaur evading cats in a post apocalyptic world to pinball playing teenage lizards in the early nineties, Rune Ryberg (1979), turns his characters to life with his dynamic, color saturated, rough style. In 2014 he made his debut as a comic book artist with the award winning Gigant published by AdHouse Books.

Rikke Villadsen is a comic book artist living and working in Copenhagen. Since her 2011 debut, she has been defying artistic conventions and surprising readers with her stories’ surreal twists. Her work questions gender as a social construct, embracing the complexity of being feminist and human. 

The Sea is Rikke Villadsen’s English-language debut graphic novel, released January 2019 by Fantagraphics Books. The tale of a sailor lost at sea is full of evocative symbolism that doesn’t just bubble beneath the surface of the water, but drenches the sailor—and reader—like a tidal wave.

Paw Krogsbæk Mathiasen is the founder, editor and publisher of Danish publishing house Fahrenheit (established 1991), the Danish publisher of the works by Craig Thompson, Miles Hyman, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb and Charles Burns and Danish artist like Peter Snejbjerg and Rikke Villadsen among many.

Paw Mathiasen will take part in SPX searching for material to publish at the Danish market.

Pernille Arvedsen is an editor at the Danish publishing house COBOLT