On the wall in Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen’s childhood home in Narsaq, there is a drawing of a large ship somewhere on the wall.
The ship has been there since Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen drew it with dark alcohol marker as a three-year-old. He said this when he won the Culture Prize in 2024 – and again when AG meets him in his childhood town three years after the award ceremony.
– I clearly remember that I was just deeply concentrated and that afterwards I was wildly happy and impressed with myself. Woah!
He laughs.
Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen stands by the window on the top floor of the blue house in Narsaq, which he moved into with his parents and older brother when he was 13 years old. And which, after 31 years away from the city, he moved back to a few years ago.
Here there are no doodles under the wallpaper or behind the paint. On the other hand, the most prominent piece of furniture in the room is a drawing table, filled with illustrations, figures and drawings.
Because in addition to being his home, this is also where Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen has his practice as a cartoonist and cartoonist.
Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen finds a sealskin chartek and opens it. Inside are the originals for the new one science fictioncomic, Nordpol 2121, which he is current with this month.
– It will be good, I’m looking forward to it coming out, he says.
When the AG meets the cartoonist, it is only two days ago that Donald Trump, Jens-Frederik Nielsen (D) and Mette Frederiksen each signed the new, historic defense agreement between the countries.
A defense agreement which includes, among other things, the possibility that a military base will soon be established in Narsarsuaq.
A potential future that is very real in Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen’s cartoon universe.
Because in Nordpol 2121, the action takes place in the Greenland of the future, which has become independent and rich in exporting ice and water to the rest of the world – and which has built its own robust defense structure, which goes by the name of NORDPOL.
A defense structure headquartered in Narsarsuaq.
Tintin and cartoons
Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen was born in 1970 in Narsaq, four years after his older brother, Kim Godtfredsen.
Their father was the town’s master baker and their mother was a manufacturer in the town’s KGH trade, where the parents had also met back in the early 60s.
– My parents are totally KGH generation, says Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen.
In the 70s and 80s Narsaq, where Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen grew up, was – despite its modest size – busy. The town was lively with many families, small private businesses and a community center where you could go to the cinema.
– It was a cool childhood town, he remembers.
As a boy, Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen had lots of energy and a desire to ride his bike and go on hunting and fishing trips with his family, but he was also a child who easily and quickly became completely absorbed in things.
At school, he was particularly interested in the history lessons, and at home he immersed himself in various comics. Everything from Tintin and Blueberry to the Donald Duck magazines that you could buy in the KGH shop.
He was deeply fascinated by the process that the comics contained and managed to tell.
Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen’s own ‘drawings’, as he calls them, began early. Already from the age of five he was at work, and around the age of confirmation he began to develop his own small comics.
– I developed characters and created the scenes. It took a hundred years, and I thought it was hard work, he says.
From anti-hero to story teller
In 1992, Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen moved from Narsaq to Nuuk as a 22-year-old.
In the same year, he was admitted to the graphic department at what was then called Aalborg Technical School, to which he had applied following an invitation from his teacher in Greenland. He then moved to Aalborg.
At that time, the idea for the cartoon character that would later become the beginning of his professional career as an artist had already begun to blossom.
– Until I moved from Narsaq, I had spent all my time drawing, developing and playing with illustrations, he says.
As part of the education in Aalborg, the students had to learn to develop illustrations that told a story with a course and a dramaturgy. Just like in comics.
Alongside teaching, he began to develop small sketches and figures.
Slowly, he began to throw more and more time and energy into his fictional comics universe, so that when Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen, as a trained media graphic artist, got a job in Sermitsiaq in Nuuk in 1995, he found it difficult to concentrate.
The work was boring, he thought, and it was difficult to reconcile the real and fast-paced news world with the fictional world he had buried himself in. After six months, Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen was fired.
However, that was not the last collaboration he had with the newspaper. In 1996, he contacted the media’s then editor-in-chief, Poul Krarup, and asked if the newspaper might be interested in a comic strip.
– I had no idea what it was going to be about, says Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen.
But he told Poul Krarup that the strip would focus on daily life in a village and describe stereotypical village residents – in a funny and self-deprecating way.
The idea was bought, and in 1997 the first strip appeared with the cartoon character “Andala” on the back of the newspaper.
– The strip stopped many years ago, but incredibly I still hear from people who miss it, says Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen and continues:
– People could see themselves in it and laugh at themselves.
Andala graced the back of Sermitsiaq every week for four years until 2001. Since then, the cartoon character has also been published in book form.
The year after Andala’s last newspaper cover, Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen met her, who later became both his wife, mother of their two children and today longtime partner, Lisbeth Valgreen.
In 2004, they moved together from Nuuk to Copenhagen.
Two years after the move, Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen was contacted by some archaeologists from the National Museum in Copenhagen, who wanted to collaborate with him on a cartoon project.
It was the beginning of twelve years of work and a total of four volumes in the series ‘Qanga’ about Greenland’s prehistory, from the first people’s journey into the country to the last period of the Norsemen in 14th-century Greenland.
The series, of which Lisbeth Valgreen also ended up becoming a central part, has been widely recognized both at home and abroad, and has been used, among other things, in history lessons in the country’s primary schools.
But the project had also required a lot of effort.
After a period of great anxiety, Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen decided in 2023 to move from Copenhagen to Narsaq. In the beginning, he just wanted to see how it felt to return home – and whether it worked with the many trips he still had to make between Narsaq and Copenhagen.
It’s been three years now.
The dream of the North Pole
Like most other cartoon projects, Nordpol 2121 has had several years behind it. The idea started in 2017 after a flight from Narsarsuaq to Copenhagen, where Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen was stunned by the sight of the ice cap.
– It’s huge, and how do you explain how big the ice is? I think that’s where the idea comes from, he says, spreading his arms.
After the flight, he began to make sketches of huge vehicles that drove on the ice sheet, and the idea of a future utopian cartoon about an independent, rich and robust Greenland sprouted.
He wrote notes that developed into a script and later turned into illustrations, lines and scenes.
– Of course I wanted to be realistic, but Nordpol 2121 is also just a product of my free imagination, he says and goes to his drawing table.
– In many ways, North Pole is my view of Greenland’s future.
Today, he is already well underway with a sequel to the first comic book in the North Pole universe, he says, flipping through some of the originals for the first book.
I can’t help but think that there is a link between what is going on now with the defense agreement between the US and Greenland, and the scenario you describe in your cartoon. What do you think yourself?
– When they signed the agreement, I thought ‘Yes, I’ll hit it’, he replies.
– But I have long expected that Narsarsuaq will one day become a base again. I dream that the old bases will be used again in some way when Greenland becomes independent.
For Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen, it has been very special to sit in Narsaq and work at Nordpol 2121. The first scenes in the comic also take place in the family house, and it is characters representing his mother and father who open the story.
However, it is also easy for the comic writer to become nostalgic when he thinks back to the way Narsaq was before he moved from the city in 1992. It makes him sad when he sees how the city has since developed.
– The children and young people in Narsaq who want to write, what options do they have? You can’t buy comics or books anywhere. Not even a newspaper, says Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen.
When he returned in 2023, the city felt smaller.
– But it is also a picture of the general development in Greenland. People from the small towns and villages travel to Nuuk. I did that myself. I even moved all the way to Copenhagen, he says.
Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen hopes that the trend will turn around. He hopes for a road all the way to Narsarsuaq, for better times for agriculture, and that people learn to make better use of the country’s resources.
He puts down the papers with the cartoon originals and walks over to the window. The tree in the garden has turned September yellow, and it is completely quiet outside. The sun glints in the water and in the fjord, which stretches far.
– Just try to see, he says.
