Felina: The Silver Cross, part 1

In the beginning, there were sketches of my cat on letters and packets. They became Felina, my second comic figure, who was to feed my family for thirteen years, earning fees from various newspapers.
Felina, the comic, was approximately four years old when I made the Silver Cross story. Every Saturday there were a standard page in the Adresseavisa newspaper in Trondheim with her. Adresseavisen was the only newspaper who wanted long serial stories, witch I like best to draw and write.

So on the brink of 1997, the year when Trondheim city would be celebrating its one thousand year birthday, I decided to make a story that would go on for one whole year and be about the founding and history of Trondheim, somehow.

 

Felina is a cat librerian in the funny animal genre. As a child I loved the Donald Duck stories of Carl Barks, so Felina was directly inspired from his duck universe. But this should be a Norwegian version, and instead of Duckburg, there was Shom - the name came from an old Norwegian folksong about a man getting work by a farmer in Telemark, and getting so rich that he buys a cow, a goat, a hen etc. and of course, his own farm - Named "Ria di via di ostan tia di o di o di shom shom shom." That is also the refrain, by the way ...

To make a story, you go treasure-hunting. And the fertile grounds to dig up something valuable was the history, of course. So I sat down and read the Snorri Sturlason Saga about the old kings and rulers of Trondheim and Norway. The book was heavy, literally and figuratively, but very, very interesting. Straightaway I was making notes, not just for Felina, but another story too, and I thought it was more difficult to decide what I had to cut out, more than what I could find to use... and I had to change a good deal of events to suit the story, so it would be coherent and clear. It was important to keep the mood and feeling of that age, and for that, I wanted Felina to be a viking bard, a troubadour. 

Then I could put songs and poems into the story in a natural way.

Continues...