The best comics for autumn: Beautiful and cruel like in fairy tales – Culture

Sandra Rummler: Be liberated

Mo grows up in a house near the wall; border police sometimes walk through her attic. The West is close and yet unreachable, a place of fantasy. In her autobiographical graphic novel, Sandra Rummler tells of her childhood in the GDR and how, as a teenager, she experienced the fall of the Wall and the harsh system change. One day the GDR flag on her house was torn, then suddenly the wall was gone. Mo can go to the West, she enjoys the freedom, but is also overwhelmed and always completely amazed: “Colorful marbles fell out of my head and rolled through the city.” Rummler draws Mo as a stencil girl, flat, without perspective. The comic artist, born in East Berlin in 1976 (who also works as an illustrator and photographer), paints her backgrounds with even more color and nuance. They are beautiful watercolors in which the East appears dark, but also calm and reliable, while the West, on the other hand, often looks like a brightly flashing department store, with the stencil girl in it who is not really connected to any of the worlds. A great debut! Martina Knoben

Hayao Miyazaki: Shuna’s Journey

A fertility story based on a Tibetan folk tale. Prince Shuna sets out with his desert mount, a yakkul, to look for golden, fertile barley seeds for his starving village. Hayao Miyazaki would have liked to tell the story of Shuna in a film, but couldn’t finance it and published “Shuna’s Journey” as a book in 1983 – now it has been published in German. No comic speech bubbles, but moments of a long journey of beautiful cinematic inexplicability, which first stretches for months, then later accelerates in a frightening way, in the land of the godmen, where the moon was born and returns to die. Shuna passes a ship made of wood and stone, it certainly hadn’t sailed once, now it was facing decay, stone statues of gods and huge rock skeletons – as always with Hayao Miyazaki, you don’t know whether they come from a dead past or from an untold future. A feeling of futility hangs over the book, in the end Shuna has lost everything, the language, the memory, the identity… only the girl Thea can save him. Two years after its release, the legendary anime studio Ghibli was founded, with which Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues created their unforgettable, beautiful animated films. Fritz Goettler

Open detailed view

Anke Feuchtenberger: Comrade Cuckoo

A home like in a fairy tale – beautiful, but also dark and often cruel. Kerstin is betrayed by her best friend Effi for a piece of “West chewing gum”. The nice Grandpa Grund feeds his animals from bowls with a swastika at the bottom. Snail girls carry dried-up conspecifics to the water. The dog Mona’s stomach is slashed open by a boar. And there are many things that are kept silent about. For example, what the Russians, “our liberators,” did back then with the women hidden in the basement. So much violence and repressed sexuality! Anke Feuchtenberger worked on her magnum opus for over 13 years, while, as a professor at HAW Hamburg, she shaped the German graphic novel scene like no other. “Comrade Cuckoo” has become a crazy work: an almost 450-page long dream and nightmare about a childhood in the GDR – and the uncanny nature of human beings. This picture narrative is hypnotically beautiful, very sensual, and nature, plants and animals look particularly seductive. An invitation to enter this cosmos, to understand, to feel, to lose yourself in this dangerous, beautiful world. Martina Knoben

Open detailed view

Michel Houellebecq, Louis Paillard: map and area

Everyday items from the hardware store, Michelin maps and satellite images, people in simple jobs… Nothing beats the beauty of the everyday, says Jed Martin, the photo and painting artist – and gives the big picture “Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst divide the art market between themselves on” finally on. Jed is a creation of the French star author MichGel Houellebecq, who can certainly compete with the Koons/Hirst couple in terms of eccentricity and provocation. Louis Pailland has transformed Houellebecq’s casual “Map and Territory”, 2010, into a tenderly radical one Graphic novel transformed, the author himself edited the text for this. Jed spends a few lovely hours in an Irish cottage with Michel Houellebecq himself, who has written his own book in a truly fearless way. Fritz Goettler

Open detailed view

Zerocalcara: No Sleep till Shingal

Anyone who has ever traveled through the Arab world knows that being able to wait is a core skill that one should have there. Waiting at borders, at checkpoints, for officials with whom you then wait for their superiors – the Italian illustrator Zerocalcare can also report on this. And it’s very amusing: “No Sleep Till Shingal” is the name of his new book, which shows that waiting and still not sleeping are not mutually exclusive. After Zerocalcare depicted the Syrian Kurds’ fight for survival and defensive battle against IS with “Kobane Calling” in 2017, he has now traveled to the region again. This time to the Yazidis in the Shingal Mountains, against whom the holy warriors committed genocide in 2014 and who are now trying to enforce autonomy in northern Iraq. “No Sleep till Shingal” is less action-packed than its predecessor, but Zerocalcare strikes the right tone to address the little-explored fate of the Yazidis in a graphic novel. And when his anarchic, laconic humor is aimed at the region’s authorities, who are still very authoritarian, it gets particularly good: Have you ever seen an Erdoğan in cosplay costume for a comic event? At least Zerocalcare imagined it – while waiting, of course. Moritz Baumstieger

Open detailed view

Joann Sfar: The Synagogue

A youth in Nice, accompanied by a terribly banal, in both senses of the word, ordinary anti-Semitism. Joann wants to fight against skinheads and neo-Nazis, assassins and defilers of Jewish cemeteries – preferably with fists AND with the law, just like his father. As a successful lawyer who puts neo-Nazis in jail, but also likes to get into fights, he is his role model – a father. But is this way of fighting also Joann’s way? France’s star illustrator Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”) looks back on difficult family circumstances and his complicated relationship to the Jewish faith in his very personal graphic novel “The Synagogue”. And at the end of the book, Sfar lists a “small chronology of anti-Semitic incidents since my birth” about a youth marked by the feeling of constant threat. He wrote down his memories as a productive (often comical) mess, with jumps in time and thought, drawn with Sfar’s typically tingly line. A young man is looking for his path: in this case it was obviously not straightforward. Martina Knoben

Open detailed view

a