Hi! I’m the artist behind Niklas and Friends. My pseudonym is “Niklas Edlund” – a big hello to all the real Niklas Edlunds out there (I know of at least three)!
The drawing to the left is supposed to show me and Niklas. My look on it is close enough to reality, though I guess you wouldn’t recognize me if we ever met in real life.
I’m an illustrator from Germany and I drew all the cartoons and pictures on this site, except some fan pictures and Davy’s cartoon. English is not my native language, so please forgive me if there’s something sounding odd. Many thanks to Tony, Oreo, Onslow, Dale and Jonathan for helping me with the language. Thanks to Julio, Peter, Zak and Guillaume for translating some cartoons. And special thanks to my Russian penpal Alex for the fine coloring of some episodes and also thanks to Eddy for coloring some aliens.
For everyone who is new to this: Welcome! Niklas and Friends is my non-commercial web comic about a couple of boys with hearts full of love, and they aren’t ashamed to show this. Or at least they try. This isn’t at all easy, I know, and that’s why I’m doing this site.
A lot of teenagers mailed me, telling that they feel the same things like my cartoon characters do and that they got problems showing their feelings. It’s sad that people think love and affection between boys is something tainted. Do you think that love could ever spoil you? Violence can spoil you, abuse does spoil your life and it’s a crime. But love?
If you came here to my site I guess you know that a boy doesn’t have a real choice between loving girls and showing affection for other boys, even today. None of the public media shows boys developing loving friendships, there are only those boy-meets-girl stories. I don’t know any TV-show or any movie comparable to my cartoons. How can a young teen ever be happy if he has to be deeply scared about becoming such a ridiculous stereotypes as they are shown on TV?
I like to show real close friendships, that kind of friendship that boys use to have as long as they don’t care about girls. Niklas and his friends don’t lie, they help each other when they’re in need, and they never hurt anybody. You have to be upright if you want to get friends, that’s my message. A lot of people start missing this kind of close friendship when they grow older, even if they never had such a close friend. My cartoons may help to revive that feeling. The older you get, the more you’ll miss it.
First of all, this is my private homepage, it’s full of amateur work and nobody gets any money for it. The only reason why it looks like it looks is because I want it. Especially the cartoons that I made on my own are my personal view on some aspects of my own childhood. I’m bisexual and I always liked girls and boys as well, even as a child. As long as I was small, I didn’t realize it, but around age 11, I began to be confused. My cartoons are about this confusion.
Some visitors of Niklas and Friends don’t seem to know the definition of pornography. It’s offending poses and certain actions with genitalia. You will not find this on my site. Niklas and Friends is rather erotic, but it doesn’t break any rules. Some say the cartoon style is just to “lure” kids here. Hey, it’s to “lure” a lot of readers here so that they can read what I and my friends got so say. And I’m convinced that even a young boy understand my stuff way better than anything erotic on TV. Can you remember the way you felt about sexual things at that age? I didn’t like those typical love scenes in movies. Ever noticed that it’s usually about a one-night stand or other “spontaneous” sex between adults? I felt uncomfortable as a child while watching those love scenes. That wasn’t my kind of sexuality. My first sexual experiences – most of them with girls – were just about lying naked side by side and some stroking and hugging. We just enjoyed our nudity.
So, I’m convinced that my stuff can’t even confuse a child. What was confusing me at that age was that my feelings didn’t match with what was on TV or in magazines. So, I made these cartoons cause they match with my feelings back then. And I wish I had the chance to read it as a child.
Whenever I had the chance to ask somebody who complained about my site, it turned out that he had never had any homoerotic feelings or experiences. So, they obviously don’t know what it’s all about and that it always starts around age 11, not later. They don’t even know that old Hite report about 50 years ago when almost 70% of all men admitted to have homoerotic experiences in their lives. My stuff isn’t about a minority.
I’ve written down a short story that is 100% autobiographical and that tells about my confusion at age 11 and even about my sexuality. Since I don’t want to mix it up with the Niklas and Friends characters, I named myself Marcus and my best friend Daniel. Every detail is authentic, just the real kissing was with another boy. My English isn’t good enough to write such stuff directly in English, so I wrote it in German first and then translated it. Thanks to Dale for improving my English! I’ve put the German version online, too.Hope you like it.
I’m drawing with simple pencils on average paper and some pictures are inked with a fine brush. I scan the line art with a cheap scanner and color it using Photoshop 4 (it’s still good enough for that, and it’s a very good tool for scaling pictures down to screen resolution). There are no secrets or tricks that I can tell. The only reason why my stuff looks good is that I have a talent and a lot of practice.
That was the FAQ.
Have fun!
