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Der Zahn

by Ayşe Klinge

Published with Kibitz Verlag

Laudatory speech:

“I don’t think I want to go in there,” Mila says on a school trip to a haunted house. She’s afraid of vampires, which of course no one takes seriously. Quite the opposite: the other kids laugh at her or even scare her on purpose. But Mila won’t let herself be intimidated. She fights her fears with drawings – which, as a comic artist myself, I find especially wonderful. In Ayşe Klinge’s images I see liveliness not only in her colored-pencil style, but also in her many-layered characters. Mila, for instance, is not weak – far from it! And even chief bully Alina doesn’t simply remain “the villain.” Across more than 200 pages, the characters change and yet stay true to themselves. And what I love most: they are really all role models for our children reading them. But wait. There’s one special element I haven’t even mentioned yet: because this is in fact also the story of Karla, who grows closer and closer to Mila. One day, Karla sprouts a vampire tooth. And we discover: she’s a vampire! This brings a whole new set of problems. Can she still go to a regular school now? Can she stay Mila’s friend? Will her friends accept that she’s changed? “Der Zahn” [“The Tooth”] weaves so many themes creatively into one wonderfully positive story: children’s fears, small and large, are blended together into a metaphor for the foreign, for being different, for change - all held together by the theme of friendship. And here I come back to my point: why are these children role models? They stand up against bullying because they sense what is right and what goes too far. They are open and they embrace their fears. They are thoughtful and voice their worries, as when Niklas cries because he’s angry that Mila would rather be friends with Karla. These kids know their own needs and boundaries, and they handle them in a positive way. Ayşe Klinge draws a world in which everything can turn out all right. Even when two seemingly opposite worlds collide. Even when things change. And the next time one of my own children loses a tooth, we’ll remember this book; and look very closely to see whether a little vampire tooth might just be growing back in its place.

-Johanna Baumann

Leib

by Lias Sinram

Published with Avant Verlag

Laudatory speech:

On the surface, Leib [Body] by Lias Sinram would be a simple coming-of-age story about Lisa, who’s in a gymnastics club with her BFF Lena - were it not for these constant disturbances running through it from the very start. The leotard Lisa got for her twelfth birthday is in flames. Everyone always does the same exercises. Except the boys. Repetition, until the movement passes into the body - the Leib - without conscious thought. The splits, which Lisa can’t do. “I would have had to practice…” “…every day.” And then, the drifting apart from Lena. The legs shaved for the first time, the blood running into the drain. The meticulously plucked eyebrows. Lisa would have had to practice every day to slot seamlessly into these bodies that rehearse womanhood so often they no longer have to think about it. The beautiful thing about Leib is that none of this is ever said out loud. Everything is resolved through the clever drawings, the pacing, the themes that keep drawing wider and wider circles. There is no aha-moment for Lisa. In the end, everything is in flames - just as the books at the Nazis' first book burning stood in flames, for which Turnvater Jahn had drawn a first list, the “father of gymnastics.” “Do you see too how the gym equipment is burning?” Lisa asks. Yes, answer we. The subtle, the many-layered, is what makes Leib an outstanding graphic novel, one that absolutely deserves to be honored. And in the end, it smells of rain.  

-Noëlle Kröger

Rabenfluch 3: Zauber und Schatten

by LIAN

Self-published

Laudatory speech:

Die kochenden Affen

by Tine Steen (Insta)

Published with Avant Verlag

Laudatory speech:

One aspect of being human, is cooking. That is who we are – apes that cook (kochende Affen). “Die kochenden Affen” is a multifaceted non-fiction graphic novel. Tine Steen illustrates the process of human evolution, drawing upon anthropology, archeology, evolutionary biology, sociology, and cultural studies. Naturally, non-fiction comics focus on correlations and information; yet, the storytelling needs to work just as effectively. The author succeeds in this endeavor in a magnificent fashion. The superb pacing ensures that the narrative tension never flags. And the humor keeps making you grin from ear to ear. The narrative voice guides the reader from hypothesis to hypothesis to speculation. It weaves together individual panels with witty punchlines, short dialogs and and charmingly illustrated recipes spanning prehistory, the Stone Age, and the very best of modern cuisine. And time and again, they themselves take the floor: apes, early humans and modern humans. Through interviews, they tell us what they eat, how they cook, and what truly matters in life. The compelling visual language, with its accessible illustrations, allows us to immerse ourselves deeply in science and culture. In terms of content, precision is maintained, facts are substantiated by sources, and open scientific questions are highlighted as such. Furthermore, the author critically examines her own working methods. In doing so, she encourages discussion and further reflection. An open, timeless book that acknowledges its own limitations.

-Illi Anna Heger

Remix: Lost Places

by Julia Kleinbeck

Created for the FUMETTO Festival in Luzern and now self-published

Laudatory speech:

“Until recently, my daily life had clear coordinates.” So begins Remix: Lost Places by Julia Kleinbeck. A first-person narrator leads us through familiar settings: a supermarket, a pet shop, a hotel. Yet the page refuses to cohere. Panels tip over, the spaces between them shimmer, image disturbances bleed across the narrative. The story glitches and refuses to become a tellable whole. We end up in a place of paranoia and surveillance, a war looms, two people hold on to each other, the outcome uncertain. Then the perspective shifts, and we see the world through the eyes of a stuffed animal that might also be a surveillance device. Panels dissolve into error and distortion until we grasp that the disturbance is the point. Kleinbeck puts the sheer noise of information into the image and pulls the comic away from pure storytelling. And still, in the cracks in the wall, we make out a tree and a bird. Are our panels even panels? Screens, scraps of paper, walls? They turn and twist, reassemble, and out of the distortions new logics emerge. This is not always beautiful, but, to borrow from Rosa Menkman’s Glitch Studies Manifesto, the glitch is “a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse.” Kleinbeck’s precisely planned errors keep the hope alive that behind the wallpaper beach on the final page real palm trees might yet grow. The bad news for a comic about glitches: it works wonderfully.

-Cord-Christian Casper

Wenn der Regen aufhört

by Jiaqi Hou (Insta)

Self-published

Laudatory speech:

In gentle ink and gray pencil, Wenn der Regen aufhört [“When the Rain Stops”] by Jiaqi Hou tells of being stuck, of waiting and grieving before the loss has even occurred. We follow Yufan, a Chinese immigrant and former art student living in a small German town that everyone is leaving - or thinking about leaving. But to where? The shades of gray are broken again and again by a golden color, which sometimes feels friendly, sometimes threatening. Much like the hometown itself, depending on whether the sun is shining and Yufan is sitting in the park with friends, or whether Yufan is treated at the traffic light as though she doesn't belong in Germany. Together with this spot color, there is a motif that runs through the entire story: water. The story opens and closes on a rainy day; in the studio there are leaky windows through which more and more water seeps in – deftly, Jiaqi Hou ties this motif together with complex themes into an oppressive mood of nationalist isolation, cultural austerity, and regressive climate policy. The water level is rising. The glimmers of hope are found in friendship. All of this makes Wenn der Regen aufhört a graphic novel that absolutely must be read now. Before the water reaches our necks.  

-Noëlle Kröger

Toxic

by Amelia Fiske & Jonas Fischer (Insta)

Published with Jaja Verlag and University of Toronto Press

Laudatory speech:

-Cord-Christian Casper & Luisa Velontrova