Actually, Susanne Kalwin only wants to build a robot. But the computer science course is instead about a flip-flop switch for traffic lights. She escapes there and ends up with a company that manufactures fully automatic egg production systems. Their idea: a robot chicken. But what you want from Susanne is that she programs the display for the yolk counter. She rebels and is transferred to marketing. Then into business development. And neither there nor there one wants to know anything about their robotic chicken ideas. In the end, will Susanne still be able to make her dream come true, or at least make the long-awaited leap into Japan, the country of robots? You can read about that in the comic “Business Girl” by Lisa Neun.
The small, fine booklet, in which Lisa Neun satirizes today’s working world with cheeky humor and a great deal of irony, came out in January at the publishing house Schwarzer Turm out in Weimar. Neun herself comes from Erlangen, where the native of Vienna has lived since 1988. She started in 1999 as one of the first Germans Web comic artists and has self-published three books. She dedicated her book “Business Girl” to the “many female inventors who went astray”. Its protagonist, whose name is reminiscent of the robot psychologist Susan Calvin from Isaac Asimov’s “Robot” series, is a whirlwind with red hair. Maybe a little naive, but she won’t let her dreams be taken away from her. And she quickly realizes that a career isn’t everything.
This is told in a minimalist, lively style, with strong colors and a deliberate tendency to exaggerate. There is a glossary of important business terms. And even if some sounds exaggerated: One has the idea that the real business world is even crazier. If you want, you can discuss it with Lisa Neun in the E-Werk in Erlangen. Because there the artist presents her book on March 8th in a connection from Reading and release party on the basement stage. But even before that, you can meet her in person.
Since 2018, Neun has been the first chairman of the Erlangen Comic Museum. The hoped-for museum is at www.comic-museum.org so far only online. Since 2020, however, the association has been able to use an action and showroom in Schiffstraße. For this they will receive “from 2023 a long-term institutional rent subsidy from the city”, as Lisa Neun tells us. And by 2024 there may even be “paid management”. Be that as it may: on February 17 at 7 p.m. there will be “Independent comics in Germany” opened an exhibition on “30 years of Gringo Comics”. The Publisher was founded in Esslingen am Neckar in 1992 and its most important series and illustrators are now being presented in the show.
Lisa Neun: Business Girl, Schwarzer Turm Verlag, 64 pages, 15 euros; Reading on March 8, 8 p.m. Basement stage of the Erlangen E-Werk (Fuchsenwiese 1)