From Dismayland to the Cable Factory
Rolling Natural 20s Through Comics Culture (A Helsinki Dérive, Part Four)
I’ve been a comic book dilettante, not because of any snobbish attitudes towards the medium and its community, but due to other “more pressing” priorities in the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Adult "Needs": music, games, computers, and defensive handgun training (Moi, olen Amerikkalinen). I owned a copy of The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen in high school and college, flirted with Lenore and Invader Zim while reading (Aurelio) Voltaire’s What Is Goth?, and now keep Maus and From Hell on the shelf like a proper adult–distant satellites in my creative orbit. Imagine my delight when, in the algorithmic noise of Facebook’s ragebait mill, I found myself staring at a single Belzebubs panel about a fictional amusement park called Dismayland.
Despite whatever lofty goals of networking human society it may have had, Facebook does its darnedest to inflame you, to stretch your scrolling attention like taffy until you’re sticky with outrage. And yet, against all odds, that one panel slipped through the gears. It was absurd, perfectly deadpan, and for me it carried the gravitational pull of a design prompt: This needs to be a game.
So I rolled my first natural 20.
The project began as a joke—a Lasers & Feelings hack re-skinned as Screams & Giggles: Dismayland Edition, a vacation in hell’s theme park where employees treat dimensional rifts like broken escalators. I wrote fake Yelp reviews, built attraction tables where rides became sentient, and drafted an employee handbook where “It’s in the manual” could solve anything from Latin-speaking toddlers to spontaneous combustion.
The more I tinkered, the more it cohered. Soon I had a tight two-page RPG zine that felt playable in line at a coffee shop. For flavor, I dropped in the Belzebubs family as pre-gen characters. Sløth became the burnt-out Veteran employee, Lucyfer the unflappable parental Survivor, Lilith the livestreaming Thrill-Seeker, Leviathan the chaos-engine toddler, and Sam the hellhound who speaks exclusively in telepathic bark memes.
The next roll was riskier: I sent the PDF to JP Ahonen, the Finnish artist behind Belzebubs. I braced for silence or, worse, a polite “please stop.” Instead, I rolled another natural 20. JP responded with warmth, called the game “absolutely amazing,” and even floated the idea of sketching doodles to accompany it. What began as a one-off gag had become a dialogue with the creator himself.
Then the dice really started to go off the rails. Months earlier, long before any of this, we’d booked a vacation to Finland. Flights through Dallas, trains north from Helsinki, a slacker’s itinerary of second hand shopping, pastries, and coffee. Only later did I learn the Helsinki Comics Fest would overlap perfectly with our trip. Serendipity or cosmic comedy, take your pick.
So I packed copies of the Belzebub hardbacks, a copy of the PDX OSR fanzine I got from an inaugural all-day gaming event at the local vegan pub, and a selection of my own TTRPGs in hard copy. Because why not? If fate deals you natural 20s, you literally roll with ‘em.
Comics and I had been estranged for decades, but Finland pulled me back. Percolating in Hakaniemen Kauppahalli a few days prior with a Pepsi Max and a munkki, I thought about my comic history: Frank Miller’s hard shadows, Roman Dirge’s stitched-up goths, Jhonen Vasquez’s gleeful cynicism. Friends had their zine phases back then too—copied at Kinko’s, smelling faintly of toner and stale sweat. Then came a long dormancy where comics disappeared from my radar, replaced by RPG rulebooks and sound gear catalogs.
So walking into Helsinki Comics Fest at the Cable Factory felt jarring and familiar at once. The musk of too many bodies in too small a hall was the same. So was the fervor, the cosplay, the awkward line chatter. What had changed was the visibility: a vibrant queer zine bloc front-and-center, not relegated to a folding table in the back. The underground was now out in the open, unapologetic and joyous.
At JP’s table, I slid forward the hardcovers of Belzebubs for him to sign. He drew sketches inside—quick, generous, full of personality. I handed him the zines I’d carried from Portland, including a copy of Björn Borg, a Mörk Borg tennis deathmatch expansion that no one asked for. The exchange felt improbably symmetrical: inspiration traveling across an algorithm, being reshaped into a game, then circling back as a tangible artifact in the creator’s hands.
I also picked up a copy of Perkeros, a graphic novel about an avant-metal band with a drummer who is literally a bear. Music is JP’s literal jam, and so are slice-of-life themes. Published as Sing No Evil in the US, the Finnish language edition just got reprinted (spotted on JP’s Instagram via an unboxing video… in Finnish, but requiring no translation), so figuring that Google Translate would bridge any gaps in comprehension I committed to a copy, along with a Belzebubs and Saatanalle reflectors.
Next door was Tony Sandoval, selling dreamlike books of his own. Elsewhere in the exhibition hall, we met Tommi, the proprietor of Stuff Bookstore somewhere outside Tampere, who sold us American indie zines and casually mentioned his friendship with Floating World Comics in Portland. The world shrank to a village of stapled pages and small-press print runs.
Looking back, the sequence feels like a streak of impossible dice rolls.
- Discovery Check (Nat 20): Spotting Dismayland in the Facebook feed.
- Creativity Check (Nat 20): Translating a comic gag into a full RPG.
- Diplomacy Check (Nat 20): Reaching out to JP and receiving praise instead of dismissal.
- Timing Check (Nat 20): A vacation coinciding with Helsinki Comics Fest.
- Completion Check (Nat 20): Signed hardbacks, illustrated, the loop closed.
Statistically absurd, but narratively perfect.
The irony is sharp. The “purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID), and social media’s purpose is outrage and distraction. Yet, through sheer misfire, it produced the one thing it rarely delivers: a meaningful, joyful connection. What began as algorithmic detritus became a playable game, a gift exchanged with its inspiration, and a story that took me across continents.
Ten time zones from Portland, sipping coffee in a Helsinki café, I stacked the memories like mismatched panels in a comic: a Facebook scroll, a zine layout, a signature sketched in ink, the smell of too many people in a convention hall. Messy, improbable, but held together by humor and community.
The odds of rolling five natural 20s in a row on a d20 are 1 in 3.2 million—numbers that feel pleasantly adjacent to Douglas Adams’s Infinite Improbability Drive, where tea and starships coexist by statistical accident. That improbability is what this whole chain of events feels like: a streak of impossible dice rolls that somehow held, improbably but perfectly, all the way to Helsinki.