Martin Kellerman is a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 cartoonist

Cartoonist

A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...

, known for the comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 Rocky

Rocky (comic strip)

Rocky is a Swedish autobiographical comic strip created by Martin Kellerman, focusing on an anthropomorphic dog, Rocky, and his friends in their everyday life in Stockholm.-Overview:...

.

Biography

Kellerman was influenced by American and Swedish underground cartoonists

Underground comix

Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...

 such as Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge is an American cartoonist. He is the creator of Buddy Bradley, Hate, Neat Stuff, Martini Baton, and Sweatshop, Apocalypse Nerd and Other Lives. His stories often use black humor and exaggerated cartooning to dramatize the reduced expectations of middle-class American youth...

, Max Andersson

Max Andersson

Max Andersson is a Swedish comic creator and film maker, mostly doing "underground style" and "artistic" comics. His comics have mainly been published in Swedish albums, and in the Swedish art magazine Galago....

, Robert Crumb

Robert Crumb

Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...

, Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar

Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.Pekar described American Splendor as "an...

, Joe Matt

Joe Matt

Joe Matt is an American cartoonist. He started drawing comics in 1987 and is best known for his autobiographical work, Peepshow. In addition to his cartooning career, he is known for his large collection of vintage Gasoline Alley comic strips. Matt lived in Canada from 1988 to 2002...

 and Mats Jonsson

Mats Jonsson (cartoonist)

Mats Jonsson is a Swedish comic creator. Debuting as a teenager in the Swedish fanzine society, Jonsson later became one of the prime Swedish representants for the autobiographical comic genre, inspired by American and Canadian comic creators such as Harvey Pekar, Seth, and Joe Matt.Mats Jonsson...

. Kellerman states that his work resembles "a mixture between really dark comics and commercial stuff like MAD

Mad (magazine)

Mad is an American humor magazine founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952. Launched as a comic book before it became a magazine, it was widely imitated and influential, impacting not only satirical media but the entire cultural landscape of the 20th century.The last...

. That's why to [underground cartoonists] I'm considered a commercial artist."

After his girlfriend broke up with him and he was fired from his job as a cartoonist for a pornographic magazine

Pornographic magazine

Pornographic magazines, sometimes known as adult magazines, sex magazines or top-shelf magazines are pornographic magazines that contain content of a sexual nature. Adult magazines are mainly aimed towards men, and in some parts of the world, many men's first sight of a naked woman has been in an...

, he created the autobiographical funny animal

Funny animal

Funny animal is a cartooning term for the genre of comics and animated cartoons in which the main characters are humanoid or talking animals, with anthropomorphic personality traits. The characters themselves may also be called funny animals...

 comic strip Rocky

Rocky (comic strip)

Rocky is a Swedish autobiographical comic strip created by Martin Kellerman, focusing on an anthropomorphic dog, Rocky, and his friends in their everyday life in Stockholm.-Overview:...

, about a grumpy, horny, hip-hop

Hip hop music

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...

-loving dog and cartoonist

Cartoonist

A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...

 living in Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

. Kellerman drew the strip as a means of dealing with his current situation and entertaining himself and his friends, but did not initially take it seriously. The strip was picked up by the free newspaper

Free daily newspaper

Free daily newspapers are distributed free of charge, either in central places in cities and towns, or with other newspapers. The revenues of such newspapers are based on advertising.-In the U.S.:...

 Metro

Metro International

Metro International is a Swedish media company based in Luxembourg that publishes the Metro newspapers. Metro International's advertising sales have grown at a compound annual growth rate of 41% since launch of the first newspaper edition in 1995. It is a freesheet, meaning that distribution is...

, and moved from publication to publication because multiple newspapers canceled the strip in response to reader complaints over its profanity and sexual content.

External links

• Martin Kellerman biography on Lambiek Comiclopedia
• Rocky Digital