Today at the Journal we've got an extensive look into the work of Olivia Vieweg's career as a cartoonist, illustrator and screenwriter, which is then used as a window into what Germany's contemporary comics scene looks like for readers and creators. It's Marc-Oliver Frisch's first article for TCJ. Here's a little taste of what he's got in store:
Curiously, the type of genre material that keeps industries alive in other countries is virtually nonexistent in German film and comics. Sure, foreign genre work is being translated and distributed en masse, but most German-language genre work—the kind of commercial work that won’t require public funding to be viable—faded away throughout the 1980s, and the industries that produced it never came back. As a work of genre, Endzeit happens to be a niche project, in comics as well as in the film industry. Vieweg wonders whether that’s another part of the legacy left behind by the Nazis, and by the public outrage and legislation against “trash” and “filth” that followed in the 1950s.
“People still think this way even today,” she says. “Comics are for children and for stupid people. And genre movies like Godzilla didn’t find any recognition, either.” Vieweg points out that some of the seminal horror films of the 1920s, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, were made in Germany—just like the frequently horrific fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, which continue to be well-regarded to this day.
“So what the devil happened there?!”, she wonders.
And on the TCJ Review front, we've got a review of a super-hero comic from DC that's written by Kurt Busiek. You'll have to click through to find out which Intellectual Property it is, but i'll give you a hint: the review is written by Noah Berlatsky, and Noah wouldn't know who to enjoy an issue of Suicide Squad even if our decade long relationship depended on it. (It did, and we're through!)
Harry Peter's art occupied an odd middle ground between Henry Darger, Beardsley, and Victorian children's illustration; his stiff figures and fluid lines lent a cheerfully quivering eroticism to images of battle kangaroos, women bound, pink ectoplasmic goo and more women bound. Together, Marston and Peter created enormously popular, sexually adventurous comics for eight year olds, as well as a brief for third-wave sex-positive feminism before the second wave had gotten off the ground. Superhero comics would never be as weird, as daring, or as beautiful again.
Elsewhere, the Doug Wright Awards were announced. It's a fine list of comics and creators, and, if history repeats itself, will probably result in a fine list of winners. And just a reminder to those of you who don't like it when art is ranked against each other, you're absolutely 100% correct. However, caring about that particular argument is boring, and no one likes listening to you talk about it.
