Jan-Oidium.com in Wacken

Squish, squash, splash made up most of the soundtrack to this year´s Wacken Open Air.

Said small piece of earth had been richly blessed by the Nordic God Of Rain since Tuesday. All the while a comic-book writer(that would be me) and his crew attempted to construct a 3x9 meter tent behind the party stage.

This tent was also loaded with goodies and features:

The upgraded "metal-potty" sporting a built-in drum kit and a new-powerful sound system along with electric guitar, amp, stage lights and hundreds of songs and backtracks to play and mosh along to.

Yesterday I got an email from the Finnish band

AGONZIER, who'd won their national metal battle and had given us a couple of mini-gigs on that same toilet: "…our performance was recorded by a German camera team and shown in German television. One of our fans from Iilisalmi told me he'd stumbled over us rocking out in some strange little hut while channel surfing (Finnish cable TV includes some German channels).That was definitely your great Oidium-toilet…"

Our Swedish friend Roger, who's been playing in our bathroom every year, is also worth a mention, as he pulled off quite a memorable show with a red cape and a bit of make-up during well-chosen breaks between the performances of the bands. His impact was, in fact, so great that he captivated the audiences of THREE neighbouring stages., drawing in approximately 200 people into the toilet's easy-listening zone with breathtaking solos and initiated massive sing-a-longs when he ripped into his strings with classics from JUDAS PRIEST and TWISTED SISTER (among others).

Probably one feature for next year is to put laminate in and around our mobile toilet. If you have any additional ideas for our metallic bathroom, you can send them to oidium@oidium-comics.de .Many thanks in advance. We'll also accept donations for a new drum kit, as the last one was utterly demolished during the course of the festival-but it was old anyway.

At the main exposition the new artwork from Jan-Oidium.com and the books from Oidium publishing also caught the eyes of many headbangers worldwide.

Sherees metal cookbook managed to impress with an article in German Star-Magazine ‘Stern’, N24 (thanks to German Press Agency (DPA)). Many other German newspapers couldn't avoid a headline and report about that book with the really far out metallic gourmet recipes.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the festival, an entirely different event was taking place: The "Metal Dream Girls" photo shooting for the second Metal Dream Girls calendar. The production of this work of art was a complete success even with all the new improvements and changes to nearly every single category and part of production. For instance the studio container that had been adjusted specially for our needs where photographer Volker Timm had all the time in a world without big explosions, loud music and other destructions to follow through with the photo shooting. As soon as we've gone through all the pictures, we'll present an additional in-depth report about the whole Metal Dream Girls project. Here I'll give you a bit of insight

beforehand:

This time we had a total of more than 800(!) candidates who contested for participation on metaldreamgirls.com. About 400 000 different visitors per month then voted for their favourite candidate(s). The really special thing about this calendar, though, is that it covers the year of the metal heads, which has begun and ended in August with the Wacken Open Air for 16 years now.

And to make all the false poser-calendars leave the hall as soon as possible we added a thirteenth month. Sounds nuts, doesn´t it? Yep, sure does.

And what's next, Mr. Oidium?

Well, Fire & Steel, the first series of Oidium comics will finally be continued. Since the first couple of issues are almost unavailable (or were sold to a holiday retreat in Cyprus as wall decorations with a cartoon theme), we decided to put out three complete stories in a 88 page mammoth of a comic book along with the first heavy metal audio story: "Fire & Steel - Live At Castle Oitiontise", with music and words written by Jan Oidium.

I'd like to conclude this article with a few words of thanks:

First off, we loved Wacken 2005. We managed to learn from our experiences last year and made enormous progress with improvements in organisation and execution of our projects, especially Metal Dream Girls and all its features, where many people had said: "Oidium, just don't do it like that ,it'll all go wrong."

Well, I did anyway and now it's done well.

We'd like to thank the people who organised the festival (Sheree, Thomas, Holger and Co.) for their patience with all of my many exploits and ventures. I'd also like to give thanks to my team, who have supported me all along through all the hard times and who´ve helped me out with even the craziest of ideas: Andreas Mues, Volker Timm, Malte Maaß, Rainer Orth, Steffi Scherer, Corinna Matho, Lars Steinhagen, Ahmina and of course Gerd Kornmann and Hans der Vogel!

Best regards,

Jan Oidium