Arctic Dreams and Nightmares by Alootook Ipellie

I like the way he uses traditional inuit imagery, it must be fundamental in his own consciouness. But imagine your big brother, or a young uncle is making up drawings and telling you stories in his usual slangy way, and he's not afraid to mention the raunchy bits neither. He writes and draws in fluent modern, is another way to put it, and I think it translates his storytelling tradition quite well.

"In a matter of seconds, The lethal harpoon weapons were hurled while the deadly arrows sprung from their bows. They travelled through the air with a definite purpose, expending their given force toward the sham of the camp!

It was the first, and the last, public execution of a hermaphrodite shaman in the long history of the arctic people.

Ukjuarlak's wonderful, passion-filled, sexual encounter with the beautiful, virginal young woman had put a price-tag on him. Public execution. Nothing less. Nothing more."

I like his pen and ink drawings, except sometimes they remind me of those macho drawings all the boys in my class drew during their drawing phase - you know, starting with Iron Man and Fantastic Four and over the years evolved into cool hallucinogenic Pink Floyd-y type things with boobs? Well, I have to live with the discomfort of that, because the book kept me interested right to the end, which is what counts after all.

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