ABSTRACT: EMERGENCE OF THE SWEDISH FIELD OF COMICS 1965-1975

Up until the mid 60s only a handful of Swedish intellectuals regarded comics as something worth serious attention and scholarly studies. This however changed dramatically as a result of pop-art’s success - especially after works of Roy Lichtenstein were shown in Stockholm in 1964. The year after, a leading avant-garde gallery in Stockholm showed comics in an exhibition that afterwards has become known as the starting-point for both organizational efforts vis a vis comics -  and also as a direct inspiration for a fan-based community consisting primarily of comics collectors. 

This however is not enough to declare the existence of an autonomous cultural field in 1965 in Bourdieu’s sense. Since most of these activities were organized and headed by a one man alone, with an almost monopolistic access to mainstream media – (press, tv, radio and book-publications), it is not until other players on the emerging field engage in debates in amateurishly edited and crudely copied comics fanzines, that the hierarchized apparatus built around The Swedish Comics Academy is challenged in a discourse central to the field itself – the definition of comics – and related to that, which one should be regarded as the first ever.According to Bourdieu’s theory on cultural fields and with the help of Swedish Bourdieu translator Donald Broady's “rules of thumb” I have in an analysis of printed material consisting of debates, articles and interviews, come to the conclusion that the Swedish field of comics reaches an autonomous state in the mid 70s partly by distancing itself from the art-field that once was its origin. 

Gunnar Krantz, comics artist and senior lecturer in visual communication at Malmö University. 

Bourdieu, Pierre (1996). The rules of art: genesis and structure of the literary field. Cambridge: Polity press

Broady, Donald (1998) ”Inledning: en verktygslåda för studiet av fält” i Kulturens fält: en antologi av Broady, Donald & Albertsen, Niels (red.) Göteborg: Daidalos.