An interview with online comics magazine Sequential Tart about Moresukine.

Sequential Tart: So what brought you from Germany to Tokyo, and how long do you think you'll be staying there?

Dirk Schwieger: Well, after I took my degree last summer in Berlin, there suddenly was this window of opportunity. I knew that I  would be facing this transitional stage of Getting Serious, i.e., having  to look for a daytime job and still trying to devote as much time as  possible to my actual work as a comics artist.

At some point I realized that there was no reason to stay in Germany, and Tokyo was definitely on top of my list. So I thought: If I make it  in the most expensive city in the world, hey, I'll make it anywhere! Which was kind of naive but strangely enough played out.

It was very appealing to me that Japan is this highly industrialized nation far, far away lacking the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western countries. Things are highly organized around here, but in a  fundamentally different way. It's most unsettling and most refreshing to  see that almost everything you take for granted in Europe or the States could just as well be done the other way around.

So, although I'll be staying for one whole year until this October, my feeling is that I will have barely scratched the surface when I leave  here.

ST: What does "Moresukine" mean?

DS: All my blog entries are drawn into this little Moleskine Notebook, which is really the cliche of an artist's journal.

The Italian manufacturer based its design on an moleskin-covered notebook from France. The company claims that famous artists and writers such as Van Gogh and Hemingway have taken notes in it, but on a closer look it turns out to be a marketing hype, and most of these artists  never really used it.

Don't get me wrong, it's a high quality notebook and I very much enjoy using it. But for me, it also stands for imitation and fake, and if you take away the negative connotations, these are keywords of Japanese culture. So I decided to use a Moleskine book for my Japan comic, and "Moresukine" is just the Japanese pronunciation of it. [...]

ST: What gave you the idea to have people give you "assignments," particularly with the addendum that you will do anything they ask, regardless of the risk to you?

DS: Well, it was important for me to forfeit authorship of this work. To not produce yet another "seminal" and precious artist book, but to disseminate it all over the internet, the "genius artist" behind it not being me but people from around the globe.

Generally my readers understand much more of what is going on in this country than I do, and I very much benefit from their comments and  assignments.

And being remote-controlled was also a reference to Japanese game culture: me as a kind of flesh-and-bone avatar being navigated through  the virtual reality of modern day Tokyo by my readers.

ST: Did you consider yourself an otaku and/or Japanese culture aficionado before you moved there? And how about now?

DS: The fact that Moresukine takes shape on the internet is very otaku, with all the virtual communication around it happening in digital neverwhere.

But when you hear about otaku in Europe, in most cases it's a synonym for "nerd" or "geek". In Japan, I have come to respect the otaku. There  is of course an insular, sociopathological element to it, but to my  surprise, I have met very communicative and sophisticated people who are  proud to proclaim themselves otaku. I don't pretend to grasp it, but it  seems to be about the adoration of a certain character while being  fully aware that it just consists of penstrokes on paper — that it's  just, for want of a better word, "fake". And about building a  multimedial altar out of anime, manga, games, novels and internet pages  for it.

So I am not an otaku, no. I just lack the degree of sophistication to be one.

In general, otaku-ness has of course become a mainstream culture and  export industry that rivals the sales of Japanese car exports, for  example. In this international sense, I definitely have become an  aficionado of Japanese culture and pop culture. I guess on my next comic  con back in Germany, the sparsely-clothed cosplayers will feel a lot  more like home. [...]

ST: What comics do you like?

DS: Tales of the Beanworld, obviously.  It would be very popular in Japan. I can only hope to approximate its  level of excellency one day and create something equally profound and  simultaneously entertaining, without the two compromising each other.

Dave Sim's experiments in storytelling, page layout, lettering and  image/text combination are without par. In my view, his complex and  insightful journeys into the outer rim of sanity — into alcoholism,  religion or love — and of course Cerebus the hermaphrodite, make him the  king of Shojo manga, although some may find this ironical. I'm  absolutely thrilled to hear that he's working on new material. [...]

I am far from being a Manga expert, but I have discovered masterful artists as Yoshiharu Tsuge or Fumiko Takano. And I have my German heroes, like Fil or Wittek. [...]

ST: What travel tips and sightseeing recommendations do you have for a gaijin wanting to visit Japan?

DS: Whew, tough one. It very much depends on the respective focus of each visitor. Some feel  more drawn to the millenia old culture, to tea ceremony, zen, kabuki.  Others seek the trashy Japan of pachinko parlours, catfights and maid  cafes. I think the best advice I can give is to peek beyond one's own  expectations of Japan, to see the theme park representations of Japanese  tradition in Kyoto, the venerable city of temples and shrines, and feel  the sacredness inside Tokyo's immense department stores. My Japan  experience centers around this unheard-of combination. [...]

– Abbreviations mine, questions by Wolven Moondaughter.

Dirk Schwieger is the concept artist among German comic artists. For him, a comic must be more than a good story. The idea behind the story is what counts. Schwieger’s works are complex: profound and hilariously funny, instructive and entertaining.

When he travelled to Japan at the age of 28 to live in Tokyo for several months, he asked his readers via a comics blog to send him tasks  by email. The concept was simple, the tasks less so. One time he had to  spend a night in a by-the-hour hotel, then he had to pursue a  martial-looking motorcycle gang. He depicted his experiences each week  on four comic pages with quick strokes of a felt-tipped pen and few  words: his fear when eating the highly-toxic puffer fish, or his  embarrasment when the lavatory flush flooded his room due to an  operating error. Later, the book “Moresukine” developed out of these subtle and self-deprecating observations. This conveniently-sized publication, now also available in English and Japanese translation, is surely one of world’s funniest and most authentic travel guides for Japan.  

Dirk Schwieger has no fear of feeling like a foreigner or of being an  outsider. When, after a few semesters of contemporary German literature,  philosophy and art history, he applied for a study place with the  artist Georg Baselitz at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK),  Baselitz only accepted him after he had ascertained that there was no other place for comic artists. In painting class, Schwieger encountered all those who fit in nowhere else – such as performance and graffiti artists. “That’s where I felt at home,” says Schwieger and adds: “It was  from Baselitz that I got the spirit of enjoying being an outsider.“  Daniel Richter, who took over the class later on, is familiar with the comics scene and set many concrete impulses. In 2005, Schwieger completed his course of study as a master student of Richter and began his travels. He spent several months each in the United States, Russia, Japan and Iceland. According to Schwieger, this was “an incredible enrichment and expansion of my art.”  

His stay in Iceland during his studies impressed Schwieger; he  lived on the polar island from 2002 – 2003 and the idea of beginning a comic project on “Elves” arose.  Schwieger researched the topic for a  year on the island, conducted interviews and collected newspaper articles and literature. “These mythical beings constitute a kind of  invisible nation, and what is better suited for documenting this world  than a comic?” he noted, and started scribbling.  

The first pages, which appeared with electrocomics as a free comic,  convey a foreshadowing of the complex project. With the scientific eyes  of an ethnologist, Schwieger characterises the people on the basis of  minuscule details. On a spread of the “elves project,” for instance, he  introduces twelve persons who answer the question of what elves are. The  overweight Heidrun describes them as “people like us who live in a  parallel world,” the intellectual Bödvar on the contrary sees them as  “Iceland’s Hollywood,” and Petur, dressed in a rustic checked shirt,  maintains that “in all my life I’ve never met anyone who believes in  this nonsense… (except maybe in the little village where I come from).”

“Every comic works with visible and invisible impulses,” explains  Schwieger adding that the viewer must connect the invisible open space  between the images in his head into a narration. Only through the  fantasy and imagination of the reader do the fragments become a coherent  story. In 2013, Schwieger returned to Iceland to get “a fresh  impression” of the country, whose population is scarred by the  consequences of the international banking crisis to this day.  Afterwards, an independent comic will emerge from the project, which is  now entitled “People Not Seen.”  

In mid-2010, Schweiger became a father for the second time. “To do  something meaningful” on the side, he translated the American artist  Larry Marder’s “Beanworld” comics into German. For Schwieger, the  philosophical stick-figure comics are a wonderful mixture of children’s  book and conceptual art with incredibly streetwise observations and very witty twists and turns. The magazine Comicgate distinguished the book with the bean figures (Ventil Verlag) as “2012 Comic of the Year”.

Schwieger has also maintained his contact with Japan over the years: in  early 2011, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of German-Japanese  diplomatic relations, he created a kind of graphic letter correspondence  between manga and comic artists: the blog Nichimandoku  stands for  Nichi = Japan + Man = Manga + Doku = Deutschland (Germany) . The  Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster suddenly gave the drawings a completely new twist. The blog turned into an impressive document of contemporary history.  

For Schwieger, word and image belong inseparably together. Both systems of signs must create friction with each other and be interwoven with each other. “I’m not a wordsmith, I'm a picturesmith,” says  Schwieger. A narrative succeeds only when a panel both contains an important idea and can stand on its own merits. For this reason as well, the concept of “comic author” suits Dirk Schwieger better than practically anyone else.

(Text by Rieke C. Hansen, originally published on the website of the Goethe Institute)

“Japan On A Dare”

Moresukine is a do-or-dare journal divided by “assignments”, maintained in its eponymous notebook, properly known as the moleskin to anyone actually fluent in English. Really a blog turned into a work of comics, its author Dirk Schwieger, a German living in Tokyo, offered to take on any assignment by his readers, who challenge him to experience everything Japanese from “gender” to “roller coasters.” But if mocking the misappropriation of a European notebook
product in its title was going to be any indication, I expected the book to offend me. The book will be published next month by NBM.

"I expected the book to offend me. [...] But I was proven wrong".

I expected Moresukine to detail all sorts of farcical Japanese behavior typical of bar banter—the modern equivalent of a war story. Chapter titles like “Assignment: Telephone Club” (Telephone Clubs are a sort of euphemism for sex clubs) and “Assignment: Fugu” (Fugu being a deadly fish edible only under expert knivesmanship) make Japan-apologists like me skeptical, as I can’t
imagine reporting on false challenges would provide anything but a mockery of them. I thought, “Here we go. Another ‘look at this backward country’ paean to all its Euro-American counterparts. I bet he’ll still sleep with a hooker after all’s said and done.”

But I was proven wrong. He did not sleep with any hookers. Or at least as far as I could tell. At times Moresukine is certainly humorous, and even mocking. “Assignment: Para Para” (wherein Schwieger examines Japanese synchronized hip-hop dancing), makes the funny scenes in Lost in Translation look like a bad episode of Full House. But Moresukine is by and large a work of populist anthropology. Neither proscribed to the tourist monuments nor opposed to trying them out, Schwieger represents a new kind of visitor—someone who makes an act of observation to get as close to whatever the real Tokyo might be.

"The actual draftsmanship of this concept-graphic novel might be the best thing about it."

But as if the blog/book platform, reader-generated content (Moresukine’s epilogue is actually a set of comics-responses from other artists who’ve been challenged by Schwieger to interact with a Japanese and draw to tell it), and the moleskin journal format weren’t enough marketing trends to light up all of Madison Avenue, the actual draftsmanship of this concept-graphic novel
might be the best thing about it. “Assignment: Pod Hotel” alone captures in drawing, all the absurdity, profundity and successful literary potential of an outsider’s look into Japan.

Divided into “pods” resembling a typical hotel “floor,” each frame works chronologically and thematically into the architecture of these temporary outposts for those who’ve missed the last train. The drawings are also a fragmentation of Schwieger’s body, contorting through different frames, to find comfort. An apt metaphor for the anthropologist.

                                – Anne Ishii, Publishers Weekly

“Moresukine – a comic book about a German cartoonist's experiences in Tokyo”

In late 2005 Dirk Schwieger, a German cartoonist, went to live in  Japan for a year. He got an office job, and started keeping a journal of  his experiences in Tokyo. On his blog,  he invited readers to email him "assignments," which he dutifully  carried out and reported in comic strip format in a Moleskine notebook.

The assignments included eating fugu (blowfish sashimi that has a toxin that could kill you if not prepared properly), going to a  capsule hotel, visiting the Ghibli Museum,  riding a roller coaster on top of a building in a shopping center,  reporting on the "coolest of the cooler things happening in Japan" (some kind of barrel with poles on it and tentacle-backpacks hanging from it  -- I have to admit I had no idea what he was talking about here), eating okonomiyaki (a bowl of raw egg, red ginger, pork, squid, shrimp, and cabbage that you cook yourself), and so on.

Schwieger's art is funny and detailed, and his observations are insightful. Moresukine is an enjoyable, too-brief account of a Westerner trying to discover Japanese culture.

                                – Mark Frauenfelder, BoingBoing

“Holiday Books”

A very different take on Japan comes from the German cartoonist Dirk Schwieger, whose comics diary MORESUKINE: Uploaded Weekly From Tokyo (NBM/ComicsLit, paper, $15.95) — the name is a Japanese transliteration of the Moleskine notebook in which he drew it — documents his readers’ challenges to experience the oddities of Tokyo culture. Schwieger is genuinely open to trying anything: he visits an origami gallery, checks into a “love hotel” and eats potentially poisonous wild fugu. He’s also attuned to the details of his environment and the way they color his social interactions. The book’s fnal section contains a handful of responses to Schwieger’s suggestion that his readers talk to Japanese people in their own cities and draw cartoons about the experience.

                                – Douglas Wolk, New York Times

“OuBaPo in Tokyo”

If the term ‘graphic travelogue’ had been coined for one particular book, then for Dirk Schwieger’s collection of episodes – Moresukine: Uploaded Weekly from Tokyo. The country and people featured in the work do not serve primarily as a setting for autobiographical explorations, for romantic or adventure novels, but are firmly on center stage.

The slim book offers impressions of Tokyo in particular, and of Japanese (popular) culture in general. However, this is not a traditional carnet de voyage (French for the genre of the graphic travel journal, so popular in France), a collection of sketches, anecdotes, and bon mots loosely strung together. While the conventional representatives of this genre are often aesthetically pleasing, informative, and entertaining, rarely are they particularly imaginative.

This is definitely not the case with Moresukine. Published by Reprodukt in 2007, the book is based on an interactive comic blog of the same name (and this, in turn, on sketches from the legendary eponymous notebook known as ‘moleskin’). From January to July 2006 Schwieger filled the notebook with 24 Slice of Life, or better, Slice of Surprise episodes dealing with his life in Tokyo.

What’s so special about it? Schwieger’s explorations are not driven by personal interests or impulses, but by the assignments posted on his blog by his followers. On 2nd January 2006, he posted the following invitation from Tokyo (in comic form): ‘Maybe you have heard of a place I should go to, or you know a person I should (try to) meet up with, or you’re just interested in a topic that’s somehow related to my new home town. […] And I will DO it, no questions asked, and whether I like it or not.’

The offer, which is made at the start of Moresukine should highlight just how much Schwieger’s collection stands apart from traditional graphic travelogues. The author does not follow his personal interests but is commissioned to be a seeker cum visitor who explores cultural phenomena and legendary places for others. A week after completing a mission, he posts a report on his blog for all to see – in comic book form.

Although Schwieger’s version of the carnet is not lacking in the integral components of travel such as drifting, or, more importantly, in this case, engaging, this openness is not translated into impulsive drawings but into carefully composed strips (with a touch of underground aesthetic), and is reflected in the fact that Schwieger does not follow a freewheeling style based on personal preferences.

In a conversation with the author, it becomes clear that there is more than one reason for this innovative version of a travelogue:  firstly, as an author, he operates perforce from the “position of a white western male”. Yet the perspective broadens as he fulfills assignments set by a range of different clients. Otherwise, he would not necessarily have visited many of these places.

Now, with his help, other users also have an opportunity to discover the ‘coveted city of Neo Tokyo’ and to compare imaginary pictures with reality. He all but becomes an avatar, helping stay-at-homes in satisfying their curiosity and in realising their missions.

The computer game metaphor is no coincidence but is the second key driver of his narrative style. Schwieger explicitly mentions Japanese games culture as inspiration for the project. It is then only logical for agreements on all missions to be virtual. One of the most recent tasks, says Schwieger, was to travel to Cambodia and to continue the project there. But he didn’t consider it. The entire project, he says, was tailored to Japanese culture.

But we can still harbour slight hopes of a continuation: he does not rule out fulfilling the remaining (specifically Japan-related) missions at some point in time, “in my old age”.

When I tell him that this approach reminds me greatly of the ‘Oubapists’, he immediately knows what I am talking about. To explain: ‘Oubapo’ stands for Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle (workshop of potential comic book art) and was founded in 1992 as comic book counterpart to ‘Oulipo’ (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or workshop of potential literature). Oubapo’s aim (as with the patron Oulipo) is to explore options of art forms with the help of self-imposed restrictions. These can be formal in nature (e.g. designing a comic book in which the text changes, but not the drawing in the panel) or can be content-related (e.g. the challenge of drawing a comic book about three arbitrarily chosen objects).

In other words, only when rules are agreed in advance can spaces open up for exploring the hitherto hidden potential inherent in graphic novels, and to inspire hitherto unthought-of new material. When an author like Schwieger agrees to take up this challenge “with no questions asked”, he does not have a finished comic book at the back of his mind, but embarks on a new journey each and every time. That the computer-game dynamic also resonates as subtext, makes his approach twice as playful.

Having described the comic book and gaming reflexive superstructure, we should at least partially disclose just where the playful approach adopted in Moresukine takes us. The 24 stages are extremely varied, sometimes the subject is the focus and sometimes the place. Together with the author, the reader marvels at the imposing landscape around Tokyo (Mount Takao); visits scurrilous non-places (Love Hotel, Capsule Hotel, Telephone Club), special museums (Studio Ghibli Museum, Origami Museum); tries different types of sushi, natto (fermented soya beans, first-timers might need some getting used to) and blowfish (fugu). Readers learn something about Japanese expressions, extravagant dances (Para Para trance dancing), and cosplay. The book is not only extremely informative but also highly entertaining.

For instance, when requested to research Japanese fashion preferences, Schwieger writes over a three-part panel on which different Metro passengers can be seen: “Women sometimes wear white, men never. Unsettling for a European, but an everyday sight: armbands and protective masks. And of course, there is still the purely ornamental use of the Roman script.”

That 15 years later the face mask has also become part of daily life in Europe, is a side note; I mention this scene for different reasons. The drawing that accompanies the last sentence shows an older lady wearing a perfectly knotted scarf, stern glasses, an overlong skirt, and a pullover that says ‘Toodrunktoo f***.’ In short: the comic book is funny.

Thanks, not only to the per se already lopsided stories, but also to the dynamic interaction between drawing and text (integral to a good comic book) which sometimes seems to cause a clash of inspiring moments. The site architecture of each episode is adapted to the respective content. The pages are peppered with original graphic ideas. In this respect: Moresukine is an absolute must for Japan fans, but also for comic book lovers. And it proves very clearly that carnet de voyage is not the same as carnet de voyage.

                                – Marie Schröer for the Goethe Institute India, 2021

A short interview for arte TV about Nichimandoku, shot at the Fumetto Comix Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland: