Like hardly any other artist, Barbara Yelin succeeds in “finding a language for the unspeakable through her atmospherically dense drawings.” The Munich native also campaigns against exclusion and misanthropy. And she is “tirelessly committed to networking the comic scene.” So there are a lot of prize-worthy arguments, as this selection of arguments shows, with which the jury of the Max and Moritz Prize 2024 Barbara Yelin was awarded this year’s “Special Jury Prize”. The Munich comic artist will receive it on 31 May at the Max and Moritz Gala in the Erlangen Markgrafentheater, at the this year’s edition of the Comic Salon.
As always, the gala is one of the highlights of the most important German comic festival, which takes place from May 30 to June 2 in Erlangen. Anyone who Special prize for an outstanding lifetime achievement It has also already been decided who will receive the prize. It will be the French comic artist, director, screenwriter and novelist Joann Sfar, who is best known for his series “The Rabbi’s Cat”, which began in 2001. His latest work “The Synagogue” was published in German last October. Otherwise, 25 titles can hope to win the Max and Moritz Prize this year. Of these, Anke Feuchtenberger’s book “Comrade Cuckoo” is just one to be mentioned, which was the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for the Leipzig Book Prize this year.
And rightly so. With this comic-of-age story set in the GDR, Feuchtenberger shows what the medium of comics is capable of. The Comic Salon has of course known this for a long time, and its program includes numerous exhibitions in addition to the popular publishing fair. One of them is the first German retrospective of Joann Sfar’s work, which also honors the French artist. The art museum is honoring the “oldest comic in the world” with “Katzenjammer Kids.” In the Kunstpalais, comics about the fluid element can be seen under the title “Watermarks,” and in the art association, works by Steven Appleby, who received the Max and Moritz Prize in 2022 for his comic “Dragman.” And a show in the shop gallery is dedicated to the worldwide “urban sketching” movement.
Also in the shop gallery, the exhibition “Draw for Change. Artistic Resistance” asks what value political drawings have in view of the many evils in the world. In keeping with this, comics from Ukraine are being shown at the same location under the title “Life in the War Zone”. In addition, the online comic project “How are you? Artists against anti-Semitism, hate and racism“ And that brings us to the other war that dominates the daily news: the one in Gaza.
The fact that this has not only divided the literary and film scene, but also the comic scene to a large extent, was pointed out by Tagesspiegel editor Lars von Törne in a illuminating report At the Comic Salon he will now speak on 30 May at 5.30 p.m. in the Orangery with Andrea Karimé, Véronique Sina and Birgit Weyhe on the topic “The Middle East conflict in comicsThe three women, like Barbara Yelin, are among the initiators of the project “How are you?” They started it in January with the hope or conviction that the medium of drawing, which is celebrated in Erlangen, can contribute to dialogue, “educate and create closeness.”