I think you just call him Jo

▷ © Florian K., since 2016


There's a vague concept I started working on a very long time ago, but never thought about in depth to be able to actually do anything with it. Some time ago I just started to fiddle with it again. It's always interesting to dig up old things from the hidden places in my head and to look how my ideas about them have changed in all those years.

Working more on something lineless and simple.
Also I nice way to use my old font FKfuthark.

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It's been almost 400 years since the last Dimmabarn was captured and executed. Nobody truly knows whether the Dimmabarn — more correctly "Dimmabarnen" = "the fog children" — were human or something else. But everyone knows that they came from the deepest parts of the woods, talked to the creatures of the earth and conjured dark spirits from the air.
People gasped in fear, decided to take rifles and sickles and eventually succeeded in wiping them all out. It's said that when the last Dimmabarn died at the edge of the woods, all mythical creatures crumbled to salt.

But in nature nothing ever truly dies and life always finds a way to sneak back. And so it happened that 400 years later children were born, born of ordinary people, but exhibiting some of the old Dimmabarn traits — special abilities; fragmented, obscured, not as pure and powerful as in the old days but still far from solely human. People looked down on these weirdlings, called them "Salthuven" and even thought it would be best if they went away like the Dimmabarn.

To protect these children the fellowship of Ånga Åska Måne was revived that once acted as a sanctuary for the Dimmabarn. It's said that Månvargen, the last living god, used to be the patron of the fellowship. But during the hunt 400 years ago most of the fellowship's knowledge was scrapped, burned and eventually forgotten.
So today, many of the special abilities of the most recent generation of children are a complete mystery and Ånga Åska Måne set out to rediscover what was forcefully and fearfully removed four centuries ago while many, if not most people still hold a grudge against the fog children.

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JOHANNES NIKLAS MARTINSSON
(he hates to be called anything other than "Jo")

Age: 17
Height: 1.72 m
Nationality: Swedish

Like many children of his kind, Jo was early put to a school specialized in "educating" youngsters with strange abilities — which means it was attempted to ignore and if necessary forcefully suppress whatever power might linger in him. And like with most other children of his kind, the treatment proved to be a failure — like I said earlier: nature always finds a way. The authorities almost convinced his parents that it would be best to give him up for adoption — a fate over 40% of all "Salthuven" have to face, which leads to them being tucked away somewhere with their parents never seeing them again.
Instead, and maybe fortunately, Jo was committed to the care of Ånga Åska Måne, but even there things didn't become easier.

Jo's condition is one of the more common types, making him some kind of shapeshifter — the original Dimmabarn were said to possess the ability to shed their skin and to turn into various animals, but this perfection of transformation died with the last Dimmabarn and their descendants are only able to change some parts of their bodies. A typical drawback of this condition is a highly instable personality, making Jo pathologically short-tempered, aggressive and wayward. His troubled childhood with people constantly trying to change him and to suppress parts of his personality made everything even worse, leaving him unable to trust others and completely destroyed his self-reliance. His aggression and bad manners help to compensate for his lack of confidence. The less he has to interact with people the more he's able to ignore his shortcomings.

Jo classes himself as a Varg — belonging to a group of shapeshifters who almost fanatically admire Månvargen, the Great Wolf in the Moon, and who believe that they are the true and only ever existing "Werewolves". The Vargar — actually "Vargarna" = "the wolves" — have a reputation of being aggressive bullies and potential sadists while thinking of themselves as noblemen — a typical behavior for the fragmented personalities of shapeshifters. But as one would or wouldn't expect, the Vargar are a highly elitist "club", not just accepting anybody into their ranks.
Jo believes that he'd finally feel like belonging somewhere once he got accepted by them and that this would prove that he's not the loser and weirdo his parents and teachers and all the other people tried to convince him of being. His only goal is to get better, stronger, more aggressive — whatever it takes to be a Varg. If he needs to sit on an icy stone in the middle of the woods, drinking the blood of a dead crow and drawing the seal of Åska into the mud with his own seed, he'd to it — if it finally helps him to be someone; to stop being a nobody. But nothing he does works; there's always failure. Because he's unable to truly think the things he does through. And he'd never admit that his way of acting, his training, all these years are wrong, are failures. No, he doesn't want to be wrong. Being wrong doesn't help him getting better. Getting somewhere.

As you might have guessed by now, Jo wants to be accepted, admired and revered. His whole behavior, attire and style exist to create a potent, aggressive, strong and aloof impression — things he admires in other people. The only things he believes are worth of being admired at all.

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Jo is basically a character I first drew in 2007 who later fell into obscurity and became the prototype for one of my other characters, Zahir. But they only share some character traits and design elements while their backstory and world is completely different.

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RANDOM MUSIC PICK OF THE WEEK

► Wardruna — Runaljod (Ragnarok)

I think that's an appropriate track.
Wardruna is a Norwegian music project that dedicates each track to a rune of the Norse Fuþark script and interprets it. Each album deals with one ætt.

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