00:05
Henrik Rehr
I have chosen A View of Lake Sortedam from Dosseringen by Christen Købke. It's a wonderful painting.

00:11
Henrik Rehr
It is composed on the horizontal and vertical lines, which is not that common for people like me who do graphic novels and comics, because we are always told to compose on the diagonals because it is more dynamic, but I guess Købke didn't get that email.

00:30
Henrik Rehr
It is a very calm scene, a very poetic picture. Some people are crossing the lake on a rowboat, meeting two women on a bridge. We don't know if they're coming or going, why they're meeting. It is a very tender painting, I think because of the way he has portrayed the water of the lake with pink and violet hues, the way he creates a very fragile light and atmosphere in the painting.

00:58
Henrik Rehr
My sister lives right around the corner from this actual location. And even though it looks different now, her and I have often taken a walk right here by this lake in Copenhagen. This one goes out to my sister, Marianne.

01:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Henrik Rehr, a Danish cartoonist. Welcome, Henrik.

01:41
Henrik Rehr
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

01:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's lovely having you. We are talking to you from Los Angeles. I believe you are in your hometown, New York, at the moment. Tell us where you are right now and why you picked this location for our chat.

01:57
Henrik Rehr
Well, I'm sitting here because this is my workspace in the apartment I live in. We live in Battery Park City, which is, if you're familiar with New York City, it's right behind where the World Trade Center used to stand, and where the Liberty Tower stands now, and Hudson River. So when I look out my windows, I can see New Jersey on the other side, and Hudson River here. We've been here for 27 years now, I think.

02:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow, that's a long time. I can see a lot of books gathered in the background on bookshelves. What am I looking at? What are your favorite books there that you've collected?

02:32
Henrik Rehr
Oh, no, I'm sorry. These are my own. So, none of them are my favorites, I'm afraid.

02:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay!

02:38
Henrik Rehr
I just have them here for reference. Sorry!

02:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay! You've written all of those books behind you. There are at least 60?

02:45
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, I've published, I think, around 40 books, some of them in different languages, too. So there might be different editions of the same book, in English and in French.

02:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Impressive.

02:55
Henrik Rehr
It is what it is. That's a good thing about doing comics. They're fairly easy to translate because they're visual. So it actually makes it a little easier to have them published internationally, as opposed to if you have to translate a whole novel of 500 pages.

03:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow. Okay. So you wouldn't call any of your books behind you your favorites, because they're written by yourself or drawn by yourself?

03:17
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, no. In all honesty, I can't stand them.

03:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Really?

03:21
Henrik Rehr
I mean, when you've done it yourself, you see all the mistakes you made. So, no, I don't know how to read my own stuff or even look at it. I think it's painful.

03:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a very strong sentiment to have.

03:34
Henrik Rehr
Well, there's a lot of other books to look at, so I don't need to worry about it.

03:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I would like to take you back in time. You grew up in the suburbs of Odense, the third largest city in Denmark. Which school did you go to, and were you the kind of student who would draw your way through all your classes, or were there some subjects that caught your attention in school?

03:57
Henrik Rehr
Actually, I didn't go to school in the neighborhood I grew up in, because I started school when we were living in a different location. So I went to the neighborhood school there and stayed there. It's a school called Rosengårdskolen, which was in a pretty new neighborhood in town at that point, and the school had just opened the year before, so we had a lot of young teachers, which created a good atmosphere, I think.

04:19
Henrik Rehr
I liked most of the subjects. Actually, I thought it was pretty interesting to go to school. They did something nice. They gave us these essay books that you could basically use for writing stories or making drawings, whatever you wanted. So I used those a lot. I liked to draw naturally, but I also really liked writing the stories.

04:38
Henrik Rehr
So if the teacher liked what you wrote, she would read it out in class. And that was my first experience of sort of success with creative work, I would say, because my classmates thought that the stories were good and funny. And so I guess I kept at it. Once you finished your essay book, you could get a new one. So I burned through them.

04:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's nice. You and I actually grew up on the same street in Odense. You were a little older than me, so we did not play together, but we shared the same streets when we were children. How would you describe your childhood home? Was it a creative household?

05:17
Henrik Rehr
Not really. My mom knew how to draw a little bit, but she didn't do it much. And mostly we were thinking about football, soccer as Americans call it. That seemed to have been the big thing, even in Odense back then when I was growing up. There were four big soccer clubs and they were always competing and everybody was somehow into soccer. And I played a lot of soccer too when I was a kid.

05:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where did you play?

05:43
Henrik Rehr
I played in B1909 (Boldklubben 1909), which was the working class club, but that's because my dad lived close to where they had their fields, when he was growing up. So he was a fan of that club, and then naturally I joined when I was six years old.

05:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I was with OB (Odense Boldklub).

05:57
Henrik Rehr
Okay, we can't talk anymore, I'm sorry.

06:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are, we are, we are enemies, you and I.

06:05
Henrik Rehr
At least when it comes to that.

06:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes. I went to Klostermarksskolen, which was a left wing social experiment back in the '70s, and we had formning, that's a kind of art class on the curriculum. We would draw and we would create all kinds of artwork, if you can call the results that. Did you have good creative teachers who helped encourage you to draw on a more serious level?

06:34
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, but not until high school. I went to Sct. Knuds Gymnasium—

06:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Me too!

06:39
Henrik Rehr
— and Keld Moseholm, who is a professional sculptor. He taught art class when I went there. And he was great. What was I, 16, when I started or something. What I drew actually started to look like something. So, he was surprised to see that I could draw, I think. I don't think I looked like an artist. I've met many people who thought I was a bartender or that's what I ought to be, but I guess not.

07:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Bartender?

07:01
Henrik Rehr
So that was nice.

07:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What made them think that you would be a bartender?

07:04
Henrik Rehr
I don't know. My haircut, I guess. I have no idea. I grew up in the restaurant business, maybe that's why. But Keld was great, actually. He encouraged you. I bumped into him now and then later on in life, sometimes on trains when he was going to one of his exhibitions. And it was just nice to stay in touch with him. He passed away a couple of years ago. I remember I was a little sad.

07:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ah, nice. Did he get to know your success in life?

07:28
Henrik Rehr
I don't know. If he read the newspaper on occasion, maybe. The last time I bumped into him, I had started publishing books and stuff. I guess I should have thanked him. Sorry, Keld. Sorry about that.

07:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For two years you owned the drawing shop, Den Blå Bil, in a street called Nedergade in the center of Odense with your friend Morten Hesseldahl. How did this come about? Who got the idea? And how easy was it for you guys to practically set it up?

07:59
Henrik Rehr
I knew Morten from high school as well. He had a little fanzine where he wrote about rock music and movies and books and comics. He was very interested in comics. And he wanted to write them. And I liked to draw them, so we became friends. And at some point he left to travel for a year in South America. And a little after that, I went to hitchhike for half a year in Europe.

08:24
Henrik Rehr
And when I came back from that trip, there was a letter from him. And he said he was lying on a beach in Brazil, and he had decided that we should open a comic bookstore when he came back to Odense. And I thought, ah, I don't know about that. I mean, do I want to have a line of credit, and be tied down to having a business as a 20-year old?

08:45
Henrik Rehr
But Morten got home and we played chess like we used to. And he's pretty persuasive and so I said yes, and we opened the store. So we got the space on Nedergade in Odense, which is a pretty cheap space. We didn't have to sell a lot of comics. And since we were interested in making them ourselves too, in the back office, we created the studio.

09:06
Henrik Rehr
And we basically found other people who were interested in the same. In the beginning, we were six or seven artists plus Morten who wanted to write. And we worked there. And people came, they took it seriously. They came, they drew as much as they could.

09:22
Henrik Rehr
When I was 16, I decided I'm going to be a cartoonist in life. And there was not a lot of understanding around me for that ambition. I perfectly understand it. We knew no cartoonist, right? I mean, I would like to draw comics, and nobody knew anybody who thought that you could make a living at that.

09:41
Henrik Rehr
But in that place, in the studio, it was called Den Blå Bil, it means "the blue car," which is where you take crazy people to the insane asylum in that car, everybody took everybody seriously, right? We wanted to do this, and we really went for it. And it went pretty well for some of us, I would say.

09:58
Henrik Rehr
First we sold a comic strip, Morton and I. Morton wrote it and I drew it. We sold a comic strip to a local newspaper. And then we got a book contract with Carlsen Comics, which was a publisher in Copenhagen. And suddenly we were up and running, and then that strip that we had in the local newspaper was sold to Ekstra Bladet, which was the largest newspaper in Denmark at that time.

10:22
Henrik Rehr
So when I was 22, 23, I had my first graphic novel out, and I had a comic strip in the biggest newspaper in Denmark. Haven't really looked back since then. I moved to Copenhagen because there was more work in Copenhagen. So we closed the store part of the business, but the studio stayed on for many years after that with other artists.

10:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Den Blå Bil, as you mentioned, it's translated as the blue car, was named after one of your cartoons. What was the cartoon about?

10:55
Henrik Rehr
Oh, it was a short little story I made with another friend, Hans Stavnsager, that we published when we were even younger. It was a comedy in a crime setting in New York City, actually. The first drawing in that little story is the World Trade Center, which was strange since years later, I lived right next to it. But that's a coincidence, I guess.

11:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was the creative environment like at Den Blå Bil? You mentioned a bunch of young people, women and men, I assume.

11:25
Henrik Rehr
Actually, there were no women at that point, but it was a real boys' club. They didn't come to join. I mean.

11:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
They were welcome, right?

11:33
Henrik Rehr
I am not going to excuse it. They were welcome, of course, but a lot of the comics that were published at that time in Denmark, too, had a, let's say, young male audience. Later on, some women joined. Iben Mondrup, who ended up writing very successful novels, was a member of the studio for a while, but that was after I left for Copenhagen.

11:53
Henrik Rehr
Generally, Odense was pretty good to be a creative in at that point, I think, maybe because it was rather boring, so if you didn't make something happen yourself, nothing happened. Some of our friends were painters, musicians. We went to Badstuen to see them play. It wasn't like you felt totally lonely as a creative person.

12:13
Henrik Rehr
There were a lot of people. You could just go into town and meet them and talk about whatever. I thought it was a very good place to grow up and want to be an artist, aside from the fact that nobody really thought you could make a living at it.

12:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You did not go to school to become a cartoonist. How did you manage to educate yourself to become a professional back then?

12:34
Henrik Rehr
Well, I don't know if I ever really managed to do that, but I got in very early and sideways. So, I mean, I was basically making a living before I knew how to draw. I was lucky. I moved to Copenhagen because there was more work there. And I joined a studio in Copenhagen.

12:51
Henrik Rehr
And two of the other guys who sat in that studio, they were a little older than me and had more experience. And I actually learned a lot from those two, Peter Kielland and Mårdøn Smet. So that was where I got the education as a cartoonist. And then of course I learned by doing, which actually I don't recommend that you start there.

13:08
Henrik Rehr
There's a lot of stuff that you could learn much faster if you learn it at an art school than trying to figure it out yourself, but of course I read a lot of books about how to draw, how to make comics, although there weren't really any in Danish, but I got some in English and French and that was pretty much it. And then I just drew all the time. That helps too, of course.

13:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And in Copenhagen you were part of Tegnestuen Pinligt Selskab. It's a fun name which translates into something like "embarrassing company." What was your meeting with the capital of Denmark like?

13:44
Henrik Rehr
It wasn't the first time I was there. My aunt and uncle lived there, so I used to come in the summer, and I had a girlfriend there for a couple of years. I mean, I knew the city. There wasn't really that big of a difference, except people thought I was from Jutland, because I had a dialect from Funen. But aside from that, I didn't think there was a huge difference.

14:03
Henrik Rehr
I lived in an apartment where there was no central heating, so you had to start a coal fire every morning in the winter, but then you tried that. And I remember when I just moved to Copenhagen, it was one of the coldest winters in years.

14:15
Henrik Rehr
And I borrowed an apartment from a friend who was in Australia. She had a boyfriend down there. And there was no heat in the kitchen. So when my hands got really cold in the morning when I was making coffee, I used to stick them in the refrigerator and that helped.

14:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are kidding. Stick them in the refrigerator?

14:37
Henrik Rehr
It was warmer in the fridge than in the kitchen.

14:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
All right, you make it sound very uncivilized.

14:44
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, I don't know. I was a poor young artist and these were cheap apartments, right?

14:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, yeah. And then from there, you took a very big step. You moved to New York in 1992. What made you decide to make this move?

15:00
Henrik Rehr
Ah, it's the same old story as everybody else. I met a woman who lived here. I went to see her and I loved the city too. It was a double whammy. I loved the woman and I loved the city and I thought, okay, you're a cartoonist, you can take your work with you, doesn't matter whether you really sit anywhere.

15:17
Henrik Rehr
You can still just mail it back to the people who publish it. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna live there for a year. And see how it works out. And that was in '92. I've been here since.

15:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was the first week in New York? How did you experience the atmosphere, the people, the vibe of the city? Do you remember? It's a long time ago.

15:39
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, I remember. Maybe not the first week, but generally, New Yorkers are famous for hustling, and I was not used to that kind of hustle, let me put it that way.

15:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were a naive Fynbo, which is a young man from Funen.

15:55
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, I was. And I was very polite, and that doesn't really cut it in New York City, so I learned. If you want your phone to work, you had to yell at somebody at some office, but then you got used to that. Then I sometimes felt maybe I was a little too rude to go back to Funen, but what can you do?

16:15
Henrik Rehr
I did experience one thing that I thought was interesting. When you emigrate, you leave your past behind, right? And I emigrated to the US, and I had no part in such things like the collective guilt about slavery or the Vietnam War or anything here. So you come as a clean slate, and that is very liberating. I felt really, really free when I got here.

16:39
Henrik Rehr
And also, in Denmark we have this thing called Janteloven, which is not so bad in Copenhagen, but still, that Danes like, to a certain degree, to keep you down. They don't want you to stick your head up too much. But there's nothing like that in New York City. Everybody brags as much as they can about how wonderful they are. I haven't really gotten used to that yet, but I'm working on it.

17:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was your first home like?

17:07
Henrik Rehr
I shared an apartment with the boyfriend of one of my then-girlfriend's friends. We were roommates. He was an Austrian, a photographer, a nice guy. And then after that I actually went to Toronto in Canada because my girlfriend, she got a job in Toronto. She grew up in Toronto too. So we were up there in two years and we got married and then we got back to New York and got an apartment here. And then we had two kids and that's been pretty much it.

17:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Was it easy to settle in and feel at home in New York? And I'm also talking professionally. Was it easy to find your professional home in New York City?

17:49
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, I think so. Like I said, I brought work with me. So I didn't have to go out and really find work. But New Yorkers are very open to immigrants, because if people are not immigrants here, at least one of their parents or grandparents for sure were, right? And okay, I was also white, which I think can help a lot, too, let's be honest.

18:08
Henrik Rehr
I never really experienced any hostility in any way, and I thought it was very easy to feel at home here. And I know New Yorkers have a reputation for being rude and abrupt, but I thought they were really nice, actually. Heh.

18:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
As you mentioned, you also stayed in Toronto for a few years. I go almost every year to the film festival there, and I love the city. How was your time in Canada, and why did you decide not to stay?

18:38
Henrik Rehr
Because Jen, my wife, got a job in New York. She was a fashion designer, and the business in New York is just so much bigger than in Toronto. She took the job in Canada, but she always wanted to come back. And I like Toronto a lot too. I think it's a great city to be in, but New York was just more happening. And we were young, and we just wanted to come back, so we came back.

18:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You continue to have a connection to Denmark. As you mentioned, you did a few cartoons for "Sandslotte" and "Ferd'nand." They were published worldwide. How does one stay so culturally connected to one's birth country to be able to create cartoons that speak to the Danes?

19:21
Henrik Rehr
I don't know. I was, what was I, 27 when I moved. I don't think you really can shake that. After a long time you become some kind of hybrid, right? You're somewhat American and somewhat Danish, but you can't really shake it. And also "Ferd'nand" that I did, which was the one that was internationally distributed, is supposed to be international, it's not supposed to be particularly Danish.

19:46
Henrik Rehr
And so I think, I don't know, I just did those things and somebody bought them and I didn't think much about whether they were American or Danish or wherever they belonged.

19:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So the Dane was still ingrained in you somehow.

19:59
Henrik Rehr
I think it always will be. Even when I go to Denmark now, people think I speak like people speak in Funen. And I'm pretty happy about that actually. My granddad had one of those conches that you pick up in the sea. And he used to show it to me when I was little. When you hold it up to your ear, you can hear the sea for some reason.

20:19
Henrik Rehr
It must have to do with the way it's shaped, right? But there is this kind of sound that sounds like the sea. And I think that's pretty much the same with the place you come from. You can travel a lot, but that sound of where you come from is always deep inside you.

20:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a nice image. That's a nice way of seeing it.

20:37
Henrik Rehr
Thanks.

20:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Several years later, September 11 happened. It was in 2001 and after this you wrote the book Tribeca Sunset, A Story of 9-11. It was partly based on your own experiences. What was your experience of that horrible day and how did it inspire you to make this book?

21:00
Henrik Rehr
Well, we lived pretty close to where the World Trade Center used to stand. We were about a block and a half away. And I was home that day with my youngest son. And we were evacuated in one direction across the river to New Jersey. My oldest son was at school about two blocks north of the towers. And he was evacuated in a different direction.

21:21
Henrik Rehr
And I didn't know whether he was alive or dead until about three in the afternoon. And it was generally just a very bad day, and it took us about three and a half months before we could get back to our apartment. It was a crime scene for a while. There was a lot of concrete dust in some of the apartments that had to be cleaned out before it could pass the EPA standards.

21:40
Henrik Rehr
And as I said, we were pretty close. It's a long story. A lot of stuff happened. But, after we came back to the neighborhood, I think I was doing the dishes one day. And I realized that maybe I should make this into a book. Also because I got the feeling from some of the people I knew in Europe, that yeah, this was horrible, but, ah, you know what, America had it coming with our foreign policy and all that.

22:06
Henrik Rehr
And I thought, there's something to that, maybe, but I just wanted to do this book to show everybody, basically, that things like this happen to regular folks, too, in New York, or in Baghdad, or in the Gaza Strip, or whatever. It's always just regular people trying to bring up their kids, living a decent life, who get caught in these geopolitical events.

22:32
Henrik Rehr
And that's why I made the book, actually. And I also thought, if I make this book I don't have to talk to people anymore about what happened that day. And I've been talking about it ever since.

22:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Would you say it's something that caused post-traumatic stress to have experienced something like that?

22:49
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, I think so. I had a really hard time a couple of months afterwards. I couldn't sleep. I thought, well, yeah, I had a bad time, let me put it that way. But talking about it is kind of why I did the book, right? I mean, it's not that I don't wanna talk about it, but there's a lot of information in that whole story.

23:08
Henrik Rehr
I had a bad time afterwards. It helped actually a lot. I suddenly had two kids on my hands too, because they couldn't get to school for a while. Well, the little one didn't go to school yet. So we took a lot of long walks and we walked a lot in Central Park and went to the playgrounds and stuff, and that helped tremendously, I must say.

23:25
Henrik Rehr
Also it was autumn in New York, which is usually a great time of the year. And it was just very healing also to see that, yeah, downtown was bad, but on the Upper West Side where we stayed with some friends, life was pretty much the way it always was. I would say it took me about a year to feel back to my good old self again.

23:44
Henrik Rehr
But I remember walking, we live right here by the Hudson River, and I always loved living here, and I still do. And I was coming home from something one day in maybe March or April after the attack. And I looked over to Jersey and the Statue of Liberty and I thought, Oh yeah, Henrik, you do live in a great place, actually. And that was nice to remember, I would say.

24:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah. I had just arrived in the US in July, so I was a newcomer, but you'd been here for almost 10 years. How did September 11 change the US from your perspective, and how did it change your own life in the US?

24:24
Henrik Rehr
In terms of my own life, I would say that, when you need help, and we needed help, and you get it, that is extremely touching. It really touches something very deep in you. And I met people who had flown in from Tennessee or Oregon just to sit and try to give us some money so we could buy groceries, right? And it gave me an enormous tenderness for Americans, I would say.

24:49
Henrik Rehr
It changed America as a society because it hadn't been hit at home for a very long time. And that created a lot of things, which is also a very long story. It was used, in my opinion, to invade Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11. And a lot of resources were spent on the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, that could have been spent on other things at home, I think.

25:14
Henrik Rehr
So in that sense, the terrorists had a certain success, I thought. But I remember talking to my wife, too, and we thought about moving, of course. Everybody was sure that there would be another terror attack in downtown Manhattan. And we decided at the end that if we move, then the terrorists have won. And we didn't want to be part of that, at least. That's where we drew the line. So we stayed. We still live here.

25:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How do you think it changed your creative energy? Did you feel a shift?

25:44
Henrik Rehr
I don't think it changed my creative energies really. I mean, it was difficult to write the script, and emotionally difficult to draw it too, the book, but otherwise, I don't know. My creative energy is pretty stable, I would say. I had a deadline on Thursday, and 9/11 was a Tuesday. I had a deadline on Thursday, and that I blew.

26:06
Henrik Rehr
But it's the only deadline I have ever blown. Two weeks later, I handed in the work like I always do. And I used a lightbox, but that was at home at my workspace, so I instead used the window in the apartment where we stayed with some friends. I don't know. I think it's also because it's actually very calming and healing to do the kind of work I do.

26:28
Henrik Rehr
So you can use that to heal some kind of trauma as well, just doing the work. I guess these days it would be called mindfulness. That wasn't invented back then. That is what I use it for. You just concentrate very much on the task at hand. And it's a pleasurable task. And it helps.

26:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does one manage to make a living as a cartoonist? I assume that one has to do some commercial jobs, like advertising for companies, for instance, and that this is where the real money is.

27:03
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, it's a mix. We have this saying in Danish, mange bække små, gør en stor å, a lot of little brooks make a river. That is basically what you do, if you're a professional freelance cartoonist. And yeah, working in advertising, of course, is a lot better paid than making graphic novels. But, that's just the name of the game, I think.

27:23
Henrik Rehr
Being an artist is not really a job, it's a way to live your life. So you have to figure it out. Obviously I'm a fool living in New York City, that's not exactly a cheap place to live. But don't buy too expensive a house that you don't know if you can afford and all that. Try to be reasonable about money, work a lot of course, and if you're lucky you get away with it. I'm sometimes still amazed that I got away with it, I have to say. But, yeah, 40 years later, I did.

27:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you have mentioned your boys, you have two sons. As a freelancer, how do you manage to juggle a career and family and kids?

28:01
Henrik Rehr
Well, actually, that was really convenient, I thought. Because when they were small, I could go pick them up from school. You know, there was somebody home, when they came home by themselves later on. We could have lunch together. That has never been a problem, I think.

28:16
Henrik Rehr
When the oldest one was really small, I took him to some art briefings at advertising agencies in New York. And I told them before I came in, I can't come in and take this briefing on this job because I have a one and a half year old at home. And they said, bring him.

28:32
Henrik Rehr
So I brought him, and he was so cute. He's still cute, but he was so cute when he was little. He had this dark, red brown hair, and he would just sit over in the corner and eat a peanut butter sandwich. And I remember even thinking back then, this is not fair, right? If I had been a woman, it would have been frowned upon. But because I was a dad cartoonist and just showed up with him on my back and all the art buyers were young women, they loved him.

28:57
Henrik Rehr
So, that worked out okay, actually. And I think I just used to put him on my back, the big one, and take him everywhere. We went to art openings and whatnot, galleries, all kinds of stuff. And I think maybe you just have to convince yourself not to be embarrassed if you're in a situation where you usually don't bring a kid, I think, and people are very understanding.

29:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned that your wife is not Danish, so I assume that you did not speak Danish at home. So do your boys, your sons, speak Danish?

29:30
Henrik Rehr
They know how to say "for Satan" and "for Helvede," which are two swear words, but that's all. My wife was born in Korea and grew up in Canada, so we have a lot of languages in the house, right? And once I thought, should I maybe start to teach my kids Danish, they basically thought it sounded silly. And then I would have a language that I could speak with them that my wife couldn't understand, and she could teach them Korean.

29:54
Henrik Rehr
Yeah, it just became a little too complicated. I speak English with my wife, of course, so that's the language in the house. I also have this theory that most of the Danes worth talking to, they can speak English. Well, that might be a little arrogant!

30:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Whoa, okay! Well, most Danes do speak English, so.

30:13
Henrik Rehr
Exactly.

30:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In 2009, you published Reykjavik, which was based on a visit to Iceland in 2005. I find Iceland to be a magical place. It's one of my favorite places. What was it about Iceland that made you make this book?

30:30
Henrik Rehr
I think the nature there. It's an abstract, graphic novel.

30:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What does that mean?

30:35
Henrik Rehr
It means that there's no people in it and the narrative is solely visual. And it's mostly about movement. It's an experimental graphic novel, and somehow that fits Iceland, the lava, the geysers, those dramatic mountains. It's a magical place. Straight out of northern mythology, I think.

30:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have created many graphic novels. Do you have any role models? I have to admit that I have not been a big graphic novel reader in my life, but I did interview the legendary Frank Miller and have a feeling that he could be some comic book artist role model.

31:14
Henrik Rehr
I'm sure he can, but he's not necessarily one of mine. I like some of his books, but I was very inspired by European comics. They came out in Denmark when I was young. I've been looking at people like Moebius, he was a French cartoonist; Hermann, who was Belgian; Hugo Pratt, who was Italian. I like Frank Miller's work, too.

31:32
Henrik Rehr
I think some of the old American cartoonists were really good, too. Hal Foster, who did Prince Valiant; Alex Raymond, who did Rip Kirby and Flash Gordon. There's so many great ones. I don't know if I have a role model as such, I think. But I was, of course, inspired by a lot of different people.

31:49
Henrik Rehr
I met some of them in real life afterwards, and sometimes that's a little disappointing. Their work might be better than their personality sometimes, I think, but that is probably the same in all industries.

32:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you have all your books behind you on a bookshelf. There are more than 40, you told me. You said before that you can't stand them, but I'm sure that there were some that were special to make and that felt special at the moment when you were creating them. What are your favorites?

32:21
Henrik Rehr
I have some favorites, but that's because I was really happy when I made them. I was in a very good place personally and with the work and some things were working out that I hadn't thought. Definitely some of the more obscure ones I've made. I did one for kids called Kvikleif, and I was just in an excellent mood when I did those books. I don't know why. So, I'm very fond of those. Of course, Tribeca Sunset about 9/11 is also about my family and my kids, right? Of course, that's close to my heart. But, is it my favorite? I'm not sure.

32:54
Henrik Rehr
I've worked a lot with other artists, both as a writer for other cartoonists who drew the scripts, but I've also drawn a lot of other people's scripts. And I tend to like those more, because you can't tickle yourself. You know all the creative decisions that go into your own work in a book, but all the creative decisions that other people put into the same book, they surprise you. I do not prefer to work with other people, but I find it delightful.

33:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does that work? How do you collaborate on something like a graphic novel?

33:32
Henrik Rehr
It depends on the people involved. There's so many different ways of doing it. But a lot of times you would have somebody write the script and somebody draw it, right? But exactly how that cooperation works depends a lot on the people involved. And there's many, many different ways of doing it. It's going to take a couple of hours to just lay all that out, I'm afraid.

33:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How do you get inspired? Do you go to museums? You mentioned walking in Central Park. What brings the creative juices?

33:58
Henrik Rehr
Museums are good, reading is good, listening to podcasts is good, reading the paper is good, reading the news is good, watching the news, watching movies— everything basically. You always have a part of your brain that's storing things away for future use, right? And I think I come up with an idea every two weeks, maybe.

34:16
Henrik Rehr
I don't think it's so hard to come up with ideas. What's really hard is to pick the good ones from the bad ones. That I don't know how to do. I'm glad I work with an agent sometimes. I'm glad I work with editors. They seem to have a better feel for that than I do. I have no idea what the public wants, really. I have no clue.

34:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How would you describe your everyday work life in New York? Is it routine based or is it very flexible? As a freelancer I assume that free time and work sort of blends into each other. It does for me.

34:49
Henrik Rehr
Yeah. I agree. I have the exact same experience. You're always on a deadline when you do what I do. So, if there's ten minutes while the potatoes are boiling, you might as well draw. That's pretty much it. Sometimes I'm too tired to work, but otherwise, I usually wake up early. Now I'm an elderly man. And the first thing I do in the morning is I work. Also, I mean, if you're breathing anyway, you might as well make a drawing, I think.

35:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I just have to point out that you are only 60 years old, so you're not an elderly man, from my point of view.

35:21
Henrik Rehr
I appreciate it.

35:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You also paint and you have had several exhibitions of your work in New York. How is this creative process different from cartoon art?

35:32
Henrik Rehr
That's very different, actually. When you draw comics and graphic novels, it's a narrative operation, right? You're telling a story. The main part of what you're doing is telling a story. When you paint a painting, that particular visual is telling a story, but it's not part of a lot of other images that are telling the same story. What you try to convey is very different in a painting than in a comic or graphic novel. And it actually has to do with what you can do visually too.

36:01
Henrik Rehr
You cannot make too many visuals in a graphic novel that interrupts the flow of the narrative. Because the reader is going to stop and you basically want them to get sucked into the story you're telling. When you make a painting, you want them to get sucked into the painting. So it's a very different approach, I would say.

36:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So you don't think you tell a story in the painting?

36:23
Henrik Rehr
I think you do. But you don't tell it in a lot of different paintings. You can do that too. But most of the time, you're telling a story, but it is not particularly long. You can convey that story in a painting usually within ten minutes for the viewer. But if you make a graphic novel, it's going to take them an hour or two to read. The time span is different, and the way that those two media work is very different, I think.

36:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question for you. Where do you see yourself retiring? Do you feel so much at home in the US that you will continue living here or maybe Denmark or somewhere else? And what do you want for retirement? Do you imagine that you can stop drawing or do you think retirement will also be about creating still?

37:13
Henrik Rehr
I'll tell you when I get there. I hope so. But on the other hand, I always thought that you have to do this work as long as you want to, and as long as you like to, and as long as you think you have something to tell, right? If you don't have it anymore, and you don't feel like it anymore, then why not stop?

37:30
Henrik Rehr
There's a lot of books I haven't read yet. There's a lot of movies I haven't seen. And where do I want to retire? I think I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. But I know you're sitting in LA and the weather is beautiful out there. It's something we always thought about. But I mean, who knows? It depends on where your kids are at that point too. And who knows?

37:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Some people dream of sitting in Miami, some people dream of southern Spain. Nothing like that?

37:57
Henrik Rehr
I like all those places, but I'm very, very happy with my life. If it goes on like this for another 20 years, I don't think I'm going to complain. Doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to live in Madrid for a while, or Paris, south of France. There's a lot of great places in the world, but New York is pretty great too.

38:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On that note, that New York is pretty great too, thank you so much, Henrik, for being with us on Danish Originals. It's been a big pleasure.

38:32
Henrik Rehr
Thank you.

38:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And the next time we live on the same street, we have to play.

38:37
Henrik Rehr
Sure! Take care!

38:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Henrik Rehr chose Christen Købke's Udsigt fra Dosseringen ved Sortedamssøen mod Nørrebro, or A View of Lake Sortedam from Dosseringen Looking Towards the Suburb Nørrebro Outside Copenhagen from 1938 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.