Timur Vermes suggests the Comic Company on Fraunhoferstraße for taking photos. As a backdrop. As the name suggests, this is about comics, and that’s also Vermes’ theme. Actually his constant theme for more than 30 years, after one day he got lost in Frank Miller’s “The Return of the Dark Knight”. He calls the Batman tape his “response drug”. From 2017 to 2020, Vermes has for Mirror online Reviews of new releases. Now he keeps his blog Comicverfuhrer.com going with reviews of comics. Vermes, 55, recently published a book under this title, a declaration of love for the “ninth art”. And yet he feels compelled to explain why he likes her so much. He delivers that right on the first few pages by declaring in one go that he likes the series “Breaking Bad” and James Bond films, as well as coffee and beer, fries and sushi, and he also likes these “adult ones way of telling stories” brought me to reading comics (again).
“Afternoon with comics”, which Vermes raves about in the foreword, he created this freedom with a bestseller. Its cover is iconic and arguably better known than the author’s name. Black, sloping parting, the book title pressed into a square: “He’s back”. He, the personified horror, whose resurrection is a nightmare for most people. The satire in which Adolf Hitler reawakens in Berlin these days has sold more than three million copies. The novel came out in 2012, was translated into more than 40 languages - including Hebrew – was set to music, filmed and staged. Inevitably, Vermes is always brought up because his life would probably be different if it weren’t for the success of this book.
Vermes, born in 1967, grew up in Nuremberg, where there is the store “Ultra Comix”, whose concept he adores. He has at the Nuremberg Evening News voluntarily, but left daily journalism behind for a long time. Vermes writes what he feels like doing. Like last August with the death of the great Sempé, father of little Nick. Vermes studied history and politics, and formulating it seems to come easily to him. Book publishers who work with him are probably hoping for further commercial success. But a book about comics as a million seller? Vermes’ laugh says something like: “I don’t think so.” This time, Harper Collins has taken his cue and released the 300-page “Comic Book Seducer.” The sans-serif font of the texts makes reading a little more difficult, but many pictures illustrate what fascinates Vermes about comics: to express with just a few strokes what others – including him – need many sentences to express. Wordy and knowledgeable, Vermes trundles through the international and domestic comic world in 36 chapters. He speaks directly to his readers, makes a lot of recommendations and tries to answer the success of manga and graphic novels, sometimes throwing out the verbal club. About Sarah Glidden’s trip to Israel, for example, which he doesn’t seem to like at all, or about Olivier Kugler’s book Escaped from War, which he mentions as “tiring to draw”.
A sequel to “He’s Back”? Vermes waves him off
Vermes suggested Motel One in Giesing for the interview. He lives not far from there with his wife and slipped through the snow on his bike for a moment. Soft armchairs in the hotel lobby, warm coffee and alert eyes behind round glasses. You sit across from each other. Vermes almost sinks into the upholstery, slides all the way forward. He sticks to you, although using the ‘Sie’ is rather uncommon in the comic book scene. Why doesn’t he make up a second or third part of “He’s Back”? Because the story has been told, because it doesn’t appeal to him any more than money, says Vermes. He is frugal. But comics need advocates. “It needs people who take on a bridging function.”
Vermes is appearing more and more frequently in the Munich comic scene. He now regularly discusses new volumes in Heiner Lünstedt’s “Comiccafé” in the workshop cinema. The organizer of the Munich comic festival hired him in 2021 to write exhibition texts on “Gung Ho”. In his book, Vermes talks to Thomas von Kummant, one of the illustrators of the five volumes, about hard work and debt. “There’s something heartwarming about the industry,” says Vermes. Basically, the genre is based on self-exploitation. Sometimes it blows you away and you ask yourself: “How do the draftsmen survive in Munich?”
And what he still wonders: Where does the resentment against comics come from, even if you read them as a child? Images are “planted” in his head forever. Scrooge McDuck’s money store with the golden coins. Or Snoopy lying on the roof of his kennel. “It can’t be comfortable.” Vermes grins. He enjoys thinking about it.