Manga by a Swede? The world is just becoming so much smaller and smaller. Coming this month, IKEA will launch CHARLOTTA, a new collection of Manga fabric designed by Sweden's Åsa Ekström. A cartoonist or "mangaka" inspired by the Japanese way of creating comic-strip stories, Åsa creates a ficticious mix of well-known buildings in Scandinavia among which Godzilla stands on the CHARLOTTA TECKNING and then shows her love of Tokyo with the motif on CHARLOTTA BLOCK. I love the CHARLOTTA MÄRKE, a mix of Scandinavia and Japan where sh'es mixed Japanese tattooing with Scandinavian motifs, "A girl in manga style dressed in a Swedish folk costume and a Viking made with an old-world Japanese mask used on stage in Noh plays as a model”, Åsa explains. See more info and images here. (Via mocoloco.com via notcot.org).