watched tatort "dunkelheit" today (prime television, excited to watch the next two newest frankfurt eps) and as a long time afdeling/department q/carl mørck enjoyer i found it funny that hamza arrives in the cold case basement for his new job there and the first thing we hear maryam say before we even see her is something about some people called andersen that never get mentioned again. like surely this choice of stereotypical danish name is a nod to the time-honoured tradition of solving cold cases in badly and greenishly lit basements while suppressing your trauma
The thing is. The thing is that I am now thinking about hamza and maryam having a cat down there. Does not fit the much less dusty much less noir much less "we are constantly smoking in here" vibe At All but maaan it would be cute............
hiii!! I finished watching dept q last night and ran to tumblr and found your comics and wanted to tell you that i fell absolutely in love with how you draw the dept q squad!!
AAAAAA thank you so much!!! 🥺💖💖💖
I've been so excited for season 2 recently, I'm so happy we get more of team doolally☺️💖.
I need to finish the last book in the series though...so I can start on the second phase😂✌️ this danish crime department full of traumatized freaks will NEVER REST!💖
til solen står op is a 141,4k long carlxassad fic I wrote in 2024 and finished in spring 2025, probably mostly through white-knuckling through burnout (and jobhunting, and quitting my job without having another one lined up, an international move, and more jobhunting, and then starting the new job while recovering from burnout). this fic kept me sane but probably also made me insane.
and then late last year I decided to bind it in a style similar to the other Afdeling Q bindings I've done, both my fic and other's. (can you believe it's been 2 years since I last bound an Afdeling Q fic?? time sure does pass.) so I started typesetting and realised that binding this fic would mean splitting it into two volumes since a single volume A6 would've been too unwieldy and would probably also give me a TBI if I dropped it on my face in bed. it splits after chapter 26 since chapter 26 is the one where they kiss, so a natural breaking point. as it so happens that resulted in two almost equal length volumes - vol 2 is 26 pages and one signature shorter than vol 1.
dustjackets: recycled packing paper of unknown origin salvaged from the recycling bin at my old job
case: bound in duo eruption over 2mm boards. vol 2 has an additional stripe of 116gsm takeo tant select N-57 (yellow) on the front cover, which is a double sided embossed slightly translucent paper consisting of 100% virgin ECF fibre (whatever that means), which I rediscovered in my stash and which is there not as a design choice or to distinguish vol 2 from vol 1, but as a cover up for printer crimes
insides: endpapers are 150gsm daler-rowney canford tangerine and the text is printed on 90gsm munken pure smooth cream
with its brethren. look at it. that's insane.
a few process photos under the cut:
so thicc. I can't believe I managed to get these square. I was worried I'd have to round them, which I didn't want to do because it broke with the squareback hardback aesthetic I had for the other books.
I had to leave my printer behind in London and buy a new one in Copenhagen and the new printer does Not like to print on bookcloth. it kept jamming and ruined the vol 2 cloth by tracking ink all over the jammed part, and while I did manage to put vol 1 through, it wound up so wrinkled I wasn't sure I would be able to smooth that out again. (I did, PVA moisture to the rescue once again. all hail PVA moisture and its ability to erase sins.) jesus fucking christ. also it's hard to tell but just above my bindery logo it does actually say 'del 1' and 'del 2' respectively lmao I was not thinking straight when I decided to print the title in red on red bookcloth. (in my defense it worked really well on dubletta!!)
headbands are from dubletta bookcloth edge cutoffs - when you buy bookcloth like you do fabric i.e. not in precut smaller sheets, it usually comes with a raw fabric edge. I trim it off and then salvage it, and often use it in place of mull on tiny books (like this one). I thought my dubletta yellow orange offcut would be a nice complement to the duo eruption especially because it had that small orange stripe at the edge and so I turned it into fake headbands with a core of glued up macramé - I couldn't be arsed sewing headbands and while my textblocks were very tidy and could've borne being naked, I just thought this would be, well, neat.
as mentioned, the printer fucked up, so I had to do something about vol 2. duo bookcloth has famously been discontinued so I didn't want to scrap it unless I absolutely had to (I only have the one sheet of this colour!!) so I mulled over options (paper inlay? maybe a rising sun with rays?) and discarded them all until I rediscovered the aforementioned takeo tant select paper in my stash. it's slightly translucent so I cut away the janky bit from the front of vol 2, laid down a 20mm strip of 160gsm canaletto cream which seemed to match the thickness of the duo bookcloth and then covered it with a 22mm strip of the yellow takeo tant select. no fancy inlays or whatever, just an off centre stripe down the front cover.
the dustjackets I made for the other volumes, which were normal, slim, volumes, were printed on this recycled paper cut to A4 size to go through the printer, which also left a decent enough amount of flaps for it to work for A6 dustjackets. these chonky bois.... I did consider not doing dustjackets (I mean, why hide away these bright af books??) but I decided I did want to protect them a little, and after poking about a bit I realised my printer supports printing on american paper sizes INCLUDING LEGAL (A4 is 210x297mm whereas legal is 216x356mm), SO:
CHECK IT OUT!!! and yes the creases are intentional - this paper was wrapped around a delivery so that's where the creases are from, and the idea behind these dustjackets for this fandom is to evoke a sense of old and dusty case files. so brown paper, creases, coffee stains.
I trimmed the jackets to be 155mm in height - the board height was 154 but with the bookcloth wrapping around the edges that means a final height of 155m - and wrapped them around the books and LO
I grossly miscalculated the placement of the back cover copy on both jackets LMAO and the neat trick of having a continuous perfect round coffee stain on the lined up spines also didn't quite work out but FUCK IT, I am DONE, I will not bind another book for probably 3 months.
friends! and foes! I signed up for Fandom Trumps Hate this year and I’m offering the following three fandoms:
Afdeling Q | Department Q (movies)
Shetland TV (though specifically Jimmy & Duncan or Jimmy/Duncan centric fic)
Daredevil TV (Matt/Foggy)
You can see my auction details here . Bidding doesn’t start until March 3rd but you do have until the 7th to get your bid(s) in.
So! This is your chance to get me to write you a fic tailored exactly to your tastes & support a charitable cause while at it. (Your own choice of charity from the FTH list.)
something i didn't anticipate from the netflix dept Q series getting popular was that the first four films would all get individual wikipedia pages... life is so beautiful...
