ARC FESTIVAL 2026! Swedish artist Linnea Sterte has been stunning us with the most visually eloquent linework since their breakout work Stages of Rot nearly a decade ago. From alien ecosystems forming around the corpse of a whale to frogs on a quest, through to epic world-building fantasy involving mysterious deities, Sterte has established a place as one of the most exciting talents in comics in recent years. As part of our ARC Festival coverage at BF we caught up with Linnea to chat batrachian quests, world-building in A Garden of Spheres, and what we can expect next from their direction…
ANDY OLIVER: Who would you count among your artistic inspirations both within and outside comics?
LINNEA STERTE: Artistic inspirations are such a hard question? It really varies between projects and I go through phases of obsessing over different things. Everyone says Moebius, which is the obvious one, though I started arriving at my style before getting my hands on any of his comics so maybe Moebius filtered through Ghibli or like stray illustrations of his found online. I studied animation so watched a fair amount of anime, which has probably also influenced how I draw, and I read first a lot of eurocomics (Tintin, Asterix etc, the usual) and then a lot of manga (anything I could get my hands on) as a kid.
AO: Playful use of comics’ relationship with the passage of time is something that stands out in your practice. Stages of Rot (above), for example, has an unconventional narrative hook involving events taking place around one object within a shifting timeframe. Is that opportunity to experiment narratively and to interrogate the medium’s possibilities a conscious part of the form’s appeal for you?
STERTE: I don’t think of myself as much of a formalist, or like I’m consciously trying to test or bend the medium. But I do think comics have like an inherent advantage when it comes to showing time, being detached from time, or like relying on the reader to deduce or fill in the events that transpire between panels. A lot of what I do in comics I started learning while doing storyboarding and not having to think about what goes between a and b in a practical sense is strangely freeing. In some sense this also applies to world-building and story in general. Like I’m still figuring out how much I can get away with just implying, how to make things feel in some sense big and real without having to show the reader everything.
AO: Your book A Frog in the Fall (And Later On) is published in the most handsome, tactile hardcover edition from Peow. It’s a beautifully reflective story so I wanted to ask you about the themes you were looking to explore there and why, for you, anthropomorphised animals are such an effective storytelling device for communicating very human themes?
STERTE: They’re fun to draw! That’s mostly it. I’ve settled for a sort of Pratt-ish pseudo-realism when drawing humans, while my anthro art has ended up more cartoon-y. Especially with the amphibians, there’s a sort of smallness and vulnerability to them – I remember as a kid we’d go down to the lake in summer and there would be all these newly emerged baby frogs, and I’d be terrified of stepping on them – which worked OK in the frog book, seeing how the protagonist is a nervous child lost in the wider world.
AO: A Garden of Spheres (above and below) is your epic fantasy-style series. It’s a book that isn’t afraid to make the reader work to piece together plot elements and discover its world alongside the characters. How would you describe the premise of the series to those yet to pick up the first volume?
STERTE: So, there’s this newly made world that’s eroding into shape. New gods are hatching out of stone eggs and creating their own little cultures of humans and humanoids. A deity with no powers of creation washes ashore in this world and wanders it, encountering new places and people in a sort of episodic manner. It’s not super plot-driven, more of a loose introduction to a place/setting. It has dragons and a lot of plants in it.
AO: How did you approach the world-building in A Garden of Spheres in terms of the civilisations and concepts we’re introduced to? Have you an end to the story planned out or is this a world which you feel you could explore for a very long time?
STERTE: I have a vague endpoint in mind – I’m terrified of starting big projects without having planned for at least an open-ended set of scenes that could work as a cut-off point, which in this case would be the main character finding out what she is and her purpose in the world and making a big decision based on that. But I can’t tell you? That would be terrible for everyone to know? And I might change my mind.
AO: You’re incredibly adept at long wordless sequences in your comics. Is that “showing not telling” storytelling approach a challenging process or, conversely, a liberating one?
STERTE: Depends. for the longest time I was really insecure in my writing and doing mostly wordless stories felt like a way of not having to bother with dialogue or over-explaining what’s going on. Lately I’ve experimented with just allowing myself to put as much text on a page as I like, and have found that strangely liberating. I think the same way I often end up cycling between digital and traditional workflows, I’ll get bored with the one than switch to the other, depending on my mood and the positions of the stars.
AO: Can you tell us a little about your creative process and the mediums you work in?
STERTE: Oh god! It really depends on the project. Right now I’m doing a comic collaboratively with Simon Roy, which is graphite lines on A3 paper, on a light table, with digital color. The little opening chapter to aGoS vol 2 from last spring was also done like that. then I’ve had a black-and-white sort of procrastinating comic going, which is all digital – done in Photoshop, using mostly the classic round brush, drawn on a Huion tablet.
AO: The Prisoners on Dozmary Craig, your “distant prequel” to World Heist, is currently available as a name-your-own-price download. What else are you working on right now? What can we look forward to next from Linne Sterte?
STERTE: Aside from the aforementioned Simon comic, I’m trying to get back to aGoS. Hopefully I can get some chunk of volume 2 done in the fall so I’m not operating on GRRM time, which would make everyone upset.
Interview by Andy Oliver
Buy Linnea Sterte’s books from Peow2 here
Linnea Sterte and Peow2 will be tabling at the ARC Festival comics fair on July 11th-12th. For the full details on everything ARC has to offer check out their website here.
Poster by Lando
