The best comics for autumn – culture

Nick Drnaso: Acting Class

The teacher’s name is John, a gray-haired inscrutable fellow, he greets his students in a sinister-friendly manner and guides them through the evenings of the “acting class” – a supervised acting out of psychological problems, role-playing as therapy. The students are ten characters who are somehow stuck in their lives, in pairs or as singles. John creates situations for them to take on unfamiliar roles and “play” company. Nick Drnaso (of “Sabina” fame) is the master of disturbed relationships, the people in his books are miserably lonely and easily disturbed, their faces expressionless – they are best identified by their hairstyles. Sometimes they seem to fall out of character, sometimes they fall into it, then frame by frame the sterile rehearsal room transforms into the homely imagined setting they are meant to play in… like in the worlds of The Truman Show, by Orwell or David Lynch. Imagination transcends borders, what looks like freedom may be terror. And the acting class, one quickly suspects this, is a friendly from the start.

Sheree Domingo, Patrick Spät: Mme Choi & the Monsters

At the beginning a much sought-after object is stolen, 1976, in the South Korean capital Seoul, a copy of the film “Bulgasari” and brought across the border – the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is very mad about him, he shovels popcorn into himself, and he promises the thief another special assignment. Then, in 1978, this concerns the acting diva Choi Eun-hee and her husband, director Shin Sang-ok, the power couple of the South Korean film industry, who made dozens of successful films together. Then it suddenly went downhill, the South Korean censors found the kisses too long and the skirts too short, and the man had an affair. The chance for Kim Jong-il, he kidnapped the diva, later her husband, and forced both of them to shoot films in North Korea again. Communism is also horny for glamour. A true-crime political thriller, unrealistically touched up by the Berlin artists Sheree Domingo and Patrick Spät, terror and brainwashing, the flowery yet brutal remoteness from the world of the Führer cult. The most radical cinephiles are always the dictators of the 20th century. The film “Bulgasari” is also freely retold in this volume, a fight for freedom with the help of an iron-devouring monster, “a long time ago, when tigers still smoked tobacco pipes”.

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Hamed Eshrat: Coming of H

Growing up in the Westphalian province. Skating, spraying, listening to music, smoking weed, high school, first love and first sex – the normal adventures of adolescence. In the case of young Hamed, other things also play a role, the father’s depression, the family’s migration background (which Hamed would never call that, he only seems to create a social gap in the presence of his crush, the beautiful Nina from a doctor’s family feel. His own family had fled Iran, his father never really settled in Germany. Moments of explosive dynamics interrupt rows of static panels. Stagnation and departure – the story is somewhat autobiographical, Hamed Eshrat was born in Tehran in 1979 and now lives as a draftsman in Berlin.His comic is not only finely drawn, but as multi-layered as its title: The H doesn’t just mean Hamed, onomatopoeic it also becomes a coming-of-age.And the H of heroin also plays a role.

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Paco Roca: The Man in Pajamas

The protagonist of this comic has fulfilled a childhood dream and spends days in his pajamas at home. The reader can assume that this character is identical in many ways to its draftsman, the Spaniard Paco Roca (“Head in the Clouds”, “Return to Eden”), the two share their shyness and domesticity and perhaps also the distant, (apparently?) naive look. At least that’s how the “man in his pajamas” looks at his environment and his own sensitivities and shortcomings, which is often very funny. The book is an anthology, many of the strips have already been printed in Spanish newspapers. However, the staying power of a graphic novel is not lacking in this series format: episodically, the strips encircle the oddities of a man and our time.

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Marjipol: Hort

The “Hort” is a flat-sharing community in which Petra, Ulla and Denise live. Three women in their late thirties who are all very special: Petra is a mountain of muscles, Ulla is a very fat giant, and Denise has modified her body into a snake woman, replacing one arm and one leg with a snake body, with a snake’s mouth in the place of a hand with fangs. The Hamburg artist Marjipol aka Marie Pohl provokes with stark images of uncanny femininity. The images – in soft, queer-feminist purple – show the pleasure she took in drawing her super monster women. She pushes the limits of body positivity to the maximum. At everyone weirdness but the three friends are so caring and kind to each other and to the three neglected children who take them in that you just have to like them. The “other” is often incorporated and domesticated these days – Marjipol doesn’t make it easy for readers.

Find the full review here here.

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Nadia Budde: Dog Look Berlin

A declaration of love to Berlin and its dogs. Nadia Budde, known for her children’s book illustrations, describes herself as a four-legged friend sniffing out her town. She smells the rubble in fresh excavations, rust and old gas in exposed pipes; Beer laughs tell about the last night. She sees the sprayed dirt of the city in the gaps between the cobblestones on the sidewalk; she discovers bicycles or shopping trolleys in the water of the Spree. Berlin is full of references to its residents. In the dream, the dog lady flies south on a discarded mattress, on the train with the other dogs in Berlin – a mattress dog bird train! It’s all beautifully drawn. And with her nose to the pavement and the wind that often blows sharply through Berlin, Nadia Budde tracks down the stories – and history – of the city.

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Thomas von Steinaecker, David von Bassewitz: Stockhausen – The man who came from Sirius

Music and world revolution, a composer who works to change society (it needs it): Karlheinz Stockhausen, who in the post-war years sparked boos from the concert audience with serial music, and later created cosmic music of unprecedented dimensions. David von Bassewitz makes this music visible in an exciting way, exuberant, powerful, filigree. It drips beyond the borders of the picture directly into the heart and brain. The volume is also a subtle cultural history of Germany, in loving detail. “How the time flies.” A double biography, so to speak, Stocki and Steini: the great composer and the young Thomas von Steinaecker, who in 1989, at home in Oberviechtach in the Upper Palatinate, discovered Stockhausen’s music and couldn’t stop fascinated by it.

Find the full review here here.

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