AGNOSIS in English cover: Agnosis No. 1 Comics by Li Oesterberg inside cover: CONTENTS: New Age p.1 Gloria sit masturbationi p.6 Rebellion in Dreamland p.11 Big thanks to Joacim Jonsson and the city library of Sandviken page 1: panel 1: During the teenage searching for a well-functioning world view I came across New Age A comic strip by Li Oesterberg 2004 panel 2: Wow! This is not at all like all those old-fashioned, intolerant religions... You're free to choose for YOURSELF exactly what you want to believe. No central authority decides how it should be. panel 3: Slowly but surely I soon had my world view clear: Life is a school where you gradually learn more and more at each incarnation. We are all parts of a greater whole, we have to learn to coexist in harmony with each other. The body and the sexuality are something positive. There are many other life forms out in the universe that are more highly developed than us and that try to raise our level of consciousness. Every individual is unique. Positive thinking and personal development and self-realization are important! panel 4: The teen years were also a period of extreme loneliness... panel 5: And since my faith wasn't a part of any social context it never happened that I embraced the New Age lifestyle completely. page 2: But some characteristic features were there of course... panel 1: "Indian music" panel 2: He wants a coke or what's he howling about? panel 3: Hum... I don't notice anything special. Maybe I don't use the right technique? Maybe I have too big mental blockings? between panels: Give the candy, you bastard! Mom and dad have said that you should offer everyone if you eat OH NO I've bought it myself, it's MINE BOOHOO WANTS WANTS panel 4: Maybe it shouldn't be done in a family full of screaming kids? panel 5: It says that this stones energy will counteract shyness... Hum... Perhaps if I wear it every day I might be socially competent eventually? panel 6: Kiowa dress of genuine deer skin panel 7: And maybe this amethyst can generate a bit more harmonious atmosphere in the house. page 3: panel 1: Actually my interest was probably a bit inherited. The women in my family had a very open attitude towards supernatural phenomena and alternative medical methods... panel 2: While the men were of the rational kind who interested themselves in sport and politics (i.e. what happened in the world. The interest was limited though only towards KNOWING, not doing anything about it). [beer] panel 3: My mother also had contacts with Sandvikens Spiritual Association (which she had managed to scare away Jehovah's Witnesses with). ...and in another life he said that I had been a pregnant Indian woman that was eaten by crocodiles. panel 4: And in this life I actually should have been born a MAN! It was thought that Anders and I accordingly shouldn't have met until next life. Huh! Drivel! panel 5: Cool! None of us should actually have been born. panel 6: Will this girl be a cartoonist? panel 7: "YES" panel 8: But how good my faith ever seemed, I sometimes was affected by doubt... So... doesn't all this just fit our times? Like the modern society looks today it is perhaps not strange that people seek themselves to these things... Or that it's just a protest against the world view of science, that you want magic and mysticism back into life? Maybe all of this can be explained very simply? page 4: panel 1: Hum... Everything about the Aquarius doesn't fit with me. I do have the ascendant in the sign of the Capricorn... Maybe I should read about that one too and like put them together...? panel 2: Astrology was a little hard to unify with basic knowledge in astronomy. But... the stars are just burning balls of gas of hydrogen and helium. They haven't always been in the constellations that they are now and they are so tremendously far away... How they have any influence on us? And is it the same with all the other beings in the universe? They also have horoscopes? panel 3: That I despite that interested myself for astrology for a while probably depended on that I so much wanted an identity. Something solid to stand on. Because at that time I was NOTHING panel 4: I had neither any political nor musical related identity to label myself with. panel 5: But astrology did not hold together. panel 6: The stones and the crystals didn't work either. YOU DON'T HAVE THE DAMNED SLIGHTEST IDEA ABOUT ECONOMY, THAT’S WHY WE ALMOST NEVER HAVE ANY MONEY!!! DON'T YELL AT ME GOD DAMN IT! I ALWAYS HAVE TO DO ALL WORK HERE AT HOME, YOU NEVER GIVE A SHIT ABOUT HELPING!!! panel 8: - SIGH - What this family needs is a miracle. page 5: panel 1: Please, give us a miracle! It might bring us together and take away all trouble... panel 2: Some kind of miracle... It could be the slightest thing... Something to make us become a real family... Please... panel 3: Who did I pray to? Guardian spirits? Some higher cosmic intelligence? It didn't matter too much. I prayed to those who pleased to listen. But a miracle did not occur. panel 4: Eventually I became too cynical and pessimistic for the New Age world view to be tenable. Gradually it broke apart step by step. Besides, it turned out I became allergic to incense. So it was kind of not fun anymore. [Crystal Healing Cures All Diseases! Only $100 Meditation Music $20 Remember Your Earlier Lives! Special Offer This Week!] page 6: Gloria Sit Masturbationi panel 1: I am sister Katharina. panel 2: I was put in a convent when I was nine years old. panel 3: For the autumn I will be eighteen and have thus had plenty of time to meditate on my situation and the place on which I will live and die. The lord is with you. And with your spirit. Go, the mass is over. God we thank you. panel 4: Ever since I was small I have not been able to avoid thinking. panel 5: I've tried cutting down on it, because I've understood it gives me a dark, reserved countenance... panel 6: ...that makes people wonder if my health is in a bad way. And even if I never have set my mind on attracting people towards me... panel 7: ...my intention has never been to repel them. page 7: panel 1: But the thoughts always return. They burn wild in my head and can sometimes make the ground I stand on uncertain. panel 2: Like there not being anything REAL... panel 3: ...no law or logic in the invisible... panel 4: Just an infinite chaos that would make us all crazy if we became conscious about its existence. panel 5: And God? page 8: panel 1: Yes, I often think about God. But He is so full of contradictions that He more seems like the name on an idea for me, a principle, which people has comprehended and still comprehends rather different. Or that we simply cannot apply our human, insufficient notions on God, that we CANNOT understand Him. And have we in that case understood ANYTHING of what He has tried to mediate to us? panel 2: Shouldn't such thoughts make my staying here in the nunnery totally unbearable? panel 3: Not really. panel 4: I see it like me playing a role and doing exactly what is expected by that role. panel 5: I mean... that's really what ALL people does, right? No matter which context you happen upon you will have to play a certain role. panel 6: That's what life is about. panel 7: And I get on pretty well with this role. There are many which had been much worse. page 9: panel 1: But sometimes I'm leaven all through by a peculiar chaos, when everything gets out of order in me. panel 2: Reality becomes vague and it feels like just ANYTHING might happen... That those who rule the world really don’t know anything but just upholds a giant, shimmering LIE. That something has been denied to me... something that could have made me a whole person. Maybe it's like what Sister Anna once said: that I have too much black gall in my body...? panel 3: After that I stopped talking about what I thought and felt. But this lack of... something... is sometimes so strong and tangible that I wonder at that nobody else seems to feel it. I'lleeh... come back soon... page 10: panel 1: To make me free from it I have to cease playing my role as Sister Katharina for a while. And become the ordinary Girl Katharina. panel 3: Outside the rules of the game I recapture my body from those who just wants it as a shell for sacred virtues. panel 4: It's done in a few minutes... panel 5: Then I'm fine again. [Thanks to Patrik Rochling] page 11: last panel: Rebellion in Dreamland by Li Oesterberg 2004 To Daniel panel 1: No, yuk! panel 2: I still remember those disgusting hot-rod Jones drivers from the holes around my town that came driving their... hot rods. It's THOSE kinds of people I associate with hard rock. panel 3: And what about the music! Disharmonious and totally soulless. It's not like that! What do you consider being fine music then, really? Almost anything but that! Ballads are nice... Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan... Yu-uk! Of all... panel 4: It is true I'm not musical or so... Heh! No But for ME there are some hard rock songs which have a strong positive value. panel 5: How could THAT have happened? panel 6: Well... It was probably the aggressiveness itself... and the lyrics... WHAT? So all their lyrics aren't about drinking and screwing girls? page 12: panel 1: It was the last year that I lived at home. I had recently been forced to pull away the last protecting veils off of my fantasy world and reality constantly lay as an ice cold knife edge against the skin. panel 2: What had you thought to do now? You have to get MONEY somewhere. Have you been to the employment office? You have to keep ahead, that's how the society works! panel 3: But how nice. panel 4: Click here That wasn't so hard, was it? panel 5: Today we'll talk some about interviews... One thing to keep in mind is that you have about 90 seconds to make a first positive impression. panel 6: bla bla bla drinking this weekend bla bla traveling abroad bla bla bla go to the gym bla bla bottom: It was at this time I realized I was trapped in a world of laws and norms I did not have control of. page 13: What you had to do was to adapt or be ruined. I had never before felt such POWERLESSNESS panel 1: Why am I so faint-hearted? Why don't I... revolt or something? Or should life really be this way? panel 2: [welfare officer] What is it you want most of all? It doesn't have to be about work or such. What is your DREAM? panel 5: I don't know panel 6: When I gazed inside I was met by a compact darkness that was some of the most tragic things I experienced in my life. You didn’t feel good. Okay, I've got it. How does hard rock enter the whole thing? I'm getting to it NOW. page 14: The music meant a temporary escape path. I didn't know many kinds of music then, and in the hard rock there was an aggressiveness that I earlier missed. An aggressiveness sometimes talking about revolting and breaking free. page 16: panel 1: But only there. For my part. panel 2: Do you understand? For ME that music was really important at that time. You must have music that meant a lot for you? welleeh... panel 3: Well then! It's exactly the same thing! panel 4: But still... HARD ROCK?! panel 6: You haven't got a shit, have you? No, but it was a sweet little story. panel 7: The end inside end cover: About the artist Okay, ehh... My name is Li Oesterberg, born in 1978 and reside in Sandviken... I've done three years at the comics artist school in Hofors and... hum... I've drawn comics since elementary school... Contributed to Optimal's recurring anthology "All for the Art". "Agnosis" is my first own fanzine. I get my inspiration from just about everything: books, comics, music and things I've experienced... Some of my favorite comics creators are Roberta Gregory, Carla Speed McNeil and Daniel Ahlgren. Hum... What more...? I have all too many siblings and lacks social competence. When I grow up I'll stop being afraid of everything. Favorite poet: Karin Boys (I'm not kidding) Favorite Nintendo game: Megaman II And right... contact: liosterberg@hotmail.com end cover: from Carmina Burana