This year, the French comic artist Joann Sfar will be honored with the Max and Moritz Prize for his life’s work at the Erlangen Comic Salon. The cultural office of the city of Erlangen, the organizer of the festival, which takes place every two years, announced this on Friday. The Max and Moritz Prize is the most important award in the German-speaking comic scene.
The jury honored Sfar “as one of the most important living comic artists for an already outstanding life’s work, which will certainly be enriched with many brilliant stories in the coming years.” In the numerous works of the illustrator and scenarist, who was born in Nice in 1971 (who also makes films and writes books), his Jewish identity, Jewish traditions and myths play a central role. Sfar became known for the comic series “The Rabbi’s Cat” (awarded the Will Eisner Award), in which he proved that the Jewish faith can also be very funny. Most recently he published the autobiographical graphic novel “The Synagogue”, in which he looks back on his youth in Nice and on almost everyday racism and anti-Semitism. Sfar’s book “The Idol Diener” will also be published in German (by Avant-Verlag) for the festival. In addition to the exhibition, the Comic Salon is celebrating him with a large retrospective.
The Munich illustrator Barbara Yelin.
(Photo: Martin Friedrich)
The festival takes place from May 30th to June 2nd. In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award for Joann Sfar, the Munich comic artist Barbara Yelin will be presented with a “Special Jury Prize” at the salon for “her profound artistic engagement with people and their experiences of persecution, war, flight and violence as well as her sustained commitment against exclusion and misanthropy.” honored. She recently published “Emmie Arbel. The Color of Memory”, in which she tells about a Jewish woman who survived three concentration camps as a child during the Holocaust and the traumatic consequences for her life. Over four years, Yelin spoke regularly with the survivor. Your book is a powerful piece of remembrance culture that also makes visible what the medium of comics can achieve in the processing of history. How to draw the Holocaust? Like trauma, the blackness in the hearts of survivors? Much of this book remains – literally – vague. Fortunately.