It was a dark and stormy night ...

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This could actually be the beginning of this book, since it was a
real ‘dark and stormy’ season when The Academic Line project was launched in late autumn 2023, conceived and developed between the Arctic Circle and Northern Europe. The project grew from our desire to move beyond traditional academic outputs and dynamics by embracing comics, humour, and fictional writing. It originated from sharing stories, fictional dialogues, and sketches about the daily academic miseries and nonsense experienced by us and by colleagues and friends. It was — and still is — an engaging coping mechanism to successfully survive the academic world we belong to. Collecting and sharing first-hand experiences and stories, we started to sketch key characters and give them a ‘voice’.

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As our fun and laughter grew, the project developed further, with an increasing number of characters and stories to collect, draw, and share.