People Not Seen is the project I am currently working on. A documentary  about Elves, memes and the power of storytelling, it describes how I set out to find the mysterious Icelandic “Hidden People” – and how, after numerous setbacks and hardships, I eventually succeeded.

The story retraces a time when I used to live in Iceland for a year, becoming progressively obsessed with the concept of Huldufólk (“Hidden People”) –  a humanoid yet invisible second society inhabiting rocks, cliffs and certain areas of the vast, breathtaking Nordic landscape.

Traversing the country, I conducted over 60 interviews with  eye witnesses whose lives have been touched, changed and sometimes even saved by the Huldufólk. The invisible civilisation is frequently described as a withdrawn, peaceful yet vengeful, ecologically minded yet technologically advanced society: While often translated as “Elves”, Hidden People nowadays fly UFOs, jump dimensions and deploy highly sophisticated stealth technology.

Lest readers prematurely misconstrue these reports as mere fantasy or science fiction figments, I went to great lengths to preserve their accuracy  – audiotaping each and every interview, asking for specific details of clothing, weather and landscape, taking pictures of the respective sites and carefully processing all the information into elaborate, realistic pen-and-ink drawings.

It is important for me to not exoticize Iceland as this somewhat quirky, socio-historical backwater country. People Not Seen will extend its focus to countries of the Global North like Germany or the United States, which are by no means less permeated by cultural memes and other uncanny idea creatures. The popcultural, fairy-taley subject of Elves rather serves as a kind of cultural contrast agent, demonstrating how much every societal body is informed – and can be re-negotiated – through stories, agreements and culturally shaped truths.

I used to live in Japan for a while, and after a few months started publishing a weekly webcomic I named MORESUKINE (inspired by the notebook I drew everything into).

The very first post included this scrawly announcement to the world:

Fortunately, people took me up on the offer, and mission after mission started to pour in: I had to sleep in a pod hotel, eat Fugu, report on gender expressions, find a traditional swordsmith and dance Para Para. It was one of the most intense periods of my life.

People from countries as diverse as the United States, Argentina and Finland sent in their personal assignments, which had to be fulfilled in the order of their arrival.

After my return to Europe, all 24 episodes were collected in a printed comic book, with additional guest missions by various webcomic artists like James Kochalka and Ryan North.

MORESUKINE is available in English and German language editions.  

      Buy on Indiebound :)     Buy on Barnes&Noble :|     Buy on Amazon :(

Kaufen bei geniaLokal :)     Kaufen bei Osiander :|     Kaufen bei Amazon :(

The Nichimandoku project started taking shape about half a year before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe.

One surreal morning, I received a phone call from the German ambassador in Japan. He had read my book MORESUKINE, and with an anniversary marking 150 years of diplomatic exchange between Germany and Japan ahead, he asked me to create a comics project that would reflect upon the common history of both countries while attracting a young Japanese readership.

I declined, assuming I was bound to miss the right celebratory note while retracing a history deeply rooted in nationalism and colonialism. Instead, I proposed a re-enactment: a contemporary comics dialogue between me and a Japanese mangaka, this time at eye level and on neutral ground – the internet. To my surprise, the ambassador was intrigued and things started to get going.

Matsuoka Waka turned out to be the perfect fit for the role of my Japanese counterpart, her polished mainstream manga style complementing my crude Western indie comix lines.

And in an effort of counterbalancing all the exoticist clichés implicit in this structure – “feminine, delicate, emotional” Japan meets “masculine, dominant, cerebral” Germany – we brought our secret weapon into the fold: Christina Plaka.

When Christina joined the project, she was not only a German citizen of Greek descent living in Japan, but also one of the best and most renown “Germangaka”,  creating original German language manga. And being the third party in this dialogue, she was our way of breaking up the dichotomy between two  supposedly monolithical cultural blocks, and taking the question of how to pigeonhole her – or anyone of us, for that matter – ad absurdum.

And so, on January 24th 2011, the first installment of Nichimandoku was published online.

Content-wise we were given a carte blanche – there was absolutely no script and, more importantly, no behind-the-scenes communication between us artists. Everything was supposed to take place  on the pages, so that we could respond in realtime in case something newsworthy happened.

Then, Fukushima happened.

And in its wake, chaos ensued. The Goethe Institute in Tokyo, a  German cultural association hosting our blog, immediately shut down – some of the staff fleeing back to Germany, others evacuating their offices to Osaka. Christina took the next plane to Frankfurt, abandoning  her studies in Kyoto. Our editor, my friend and comics sensei Jaqueline Berndt, dissolved her household in Yokohama, despite its 200 miles distance to Fukushima too close for taking chances.

After consulting with her, we dropped two pre-produced blog entries and hastily put together a joint reaction to the disaster. And despite our infrastructure being all but broken  (the lady who used to upload my blog entries had hurriedly left the country), we finally managed to publish it on our Japanese blog two days after the catastrophe:

From that day on, there was only one topic on our minds – reporting  from two countries whose political reactions couldn’t have been more  different: While Japanese officials tried to assuage fears by engaging in piecemeal tactics, German media coverage was panic-stricken, the  government finally giving in to a definitive nuclear phase-out.

Only Christina, having returned to her studies in Japan and still  struggling with that decision, soon felt the need to counterweight our  gloom-mongering with a more light-hearted approach through topics like women’s soccer or gender stereotypes.

For our last blog entry of 2011, we staged a genuine reenactment: Just like the Prussian delegates of yore, I travelled to Kyoto and met Matsuoka-san and Christina in person. And just like 150 years ago, when a friendship and trade agreement was signed, we drew our last double page of this terrible year together on one piece of paper.

The anniversary celebrations might have faded away, Fukushima, however, will remain a pressing concern for ages to come. According to operating company Tepco, the dismantling of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site should be completed by the time I turn 70 years old. In the meantime, I hope to be able to continue our long-term project every now and then, exchanging views on our lives, culture, and the catastrophe crawling through the decades.

Update: I have set out to translate the existing pages into English in order to make their content accessible to a larger audience. My time is somewhat limited at the moment, though – if you have basic Gimp or Photoshop skills and would like to help out, please say hi.

Bit by bit, the English-language pages will be published here:

https://nichimandoku.wordpress.com

(Come to think of it, I could also use some help migrating from wordpress to Ghost, but who doesn't.)

The ineinander series marks my first foray into self-publishing.

Inspired by the North American self-publishing wave of the 1990's, I founded my own publishing company in the year 2000 and published five issues that follow the lives of Pablo, Kai and Stepha, three twentysomethings living in contemporary Germany.

The narrative structure has a twist to it: the published issues constitute the first half of a larger story arc. Titled “vormittage” (“forenoons”), this part already tells the story from beginning to end, yet only sheds light on those parts of it that have taken place between 12 pm and 12 am.

The second half, titled  “nachmittage” (“afternoons”) will be winding back the story to the very beginning, filling us in on those scenes that took place between midday and midnight.

In addition to describing the relationship between the three people, ineinander just as much describes the relationship between words and images themselves, constantly examining new ways both could be combined to tell a story.

The result has been equally lauded as an “experimental lab kit for the science of comics” as it has been panned as a mystifying “comic book of seven seals”.

And what can I say, everytime the storyline gathers momentum and begins to appear somewhat coherent, a sudden diversion occurs, a dream sequence, a sunday strip or, even worse, concrete poetry.

I'm very proud of this first larger story, written and drawn in my early twenties, and look forward to finishing it somewhere in the afternoon of my life.