Why Rebel Kayaks went Agent X9

If you've read your way down the journal, you've probably noticed it plays like a run of episodes. There's a recurring crew: Meet the Rollers introduces Tibor and Stefan, Martin turns up grumpy in Shit Happens, and a mysterious Count of Greenland shows up with mittens and a counting system. There's a quest (In Search for the Holy Grail), a season-long mission (To Winter Rolling), a comeback story (From Numb Bum to Butterfly Roll) and, of course, a villain: the Factory Mold, with its henchman The Carbon Myth.

Headlines like "Quit Lurking", "Are You a SOFtie?" and "Get Your Butt in Gear" already read like speech bubbles. Someone just had to draw the bubbles.

So why dress adventures up as a plain old blog? We stopped doing that. And if you think we got it wrong, help us listen better, or go ahead and write your own story. Any story. It gets the same panels as ours.

Why Agent X9 in particular:

• It's our kind of hero. One paddler, a narrow hull, lousy weather, on a mission nobody on the beach understands. That's noir, baby. Nobody in X9 ever had a crowd coming to the rescue either. Remember Rip Kirby, Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin? They were for real...ish. (Fun fact: Alex Raymond drew both the original Secret Agent X-9 in 1934 and Rip Kirby. Same ink, different detective.)

• Ink, not gloss. Black-and-white inking, heavy shadows and one spot colour (red, obviously) are the exact opposite of the glossy carbon brochure we like to make fun of. A comic strip can't look corporate. That's the whole point.

• We already tell stories in panels. Setup, capsize, roll, punchline. Every post is a short strip, so the journal grid became a comic page.

• It gives the crew faces. Johan (Wirsén, from Creating the NajaRaz), Tibor, Stefan, Martin and the Count (whoever that is, Ulrich perhaps?) become recurring characters instead of bylines. You buy the next issue to see what the characters get up to. We're betting that works for kayak stories too ;)

• Fun is a feature. Traditional paddling has a reputation for being dead earnest and more than a little gatekept. We think it's the most fun you can have in (cold) water. The site should grin the way the writing does.

• It's Scandinavian nostalgia. X9 hit Swedish newsstands in 1969, became Agent X9 in 1971, and Modesty Blaise has been running the show since the early 70s. It's still published. Plenty of Nordic paddlers grew up reading it off the magazine rack, so the look is an in-joke with our own crowd, and they'll (probably) get it. Everyone else just got a history lesson. You're welcome ;)

What it's not: a costume. The substance stays put: hulls built around the paddler, rolling, and thousands of years of Arctic know-how. The comic frame is just a more honest wrapper for how we already talk.

In one line: We write like a comic strip, so now we look like one. To complete the analogy: go ahead, tear us apart!

//Tibor