My colleague Isobel tells me that Ralph Ruthe has picked up the Sondermann Award in the Cartoons category at the Frankfurt Bookfair (text is in German), one of the publishing world’s major international events, for the second year in a row. Ralph is one of the gifted European artists who is featured in the comics insert in our new FPI catalogue (and also did the art for our Christmas cards this year) – the catalogues are in our branches now, so please do check him out; you can also visit his official page here. Other winners at Frankfurt include Frank Miller in the International category, Arina Tanemura for the Manga International section and Walter Moers for the Comic category.
Despite being very well-known in Germany I haven’t seen much of Moers comics work in English (mostly his children’s books have been seen here), but I have come across his illustrations in his own novel The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear, which were wonderful, a mix of the innocent, almost kid’s picture book level with a much more knowing adult sensibility which compimented his prose perfectly. It is really a prose fantasy with illustrations, not a graphic novel, but I highly recommend it if you come across it.
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November 7th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
[...] And reflecting that example has been the growth at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where over the last five or six years there has been a focus on comics, which began as an experiment and proved so successful that now the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest book fair certainly I’m aware of, has a major focus on comics every year as the whole artform and medium has taken off. Other festivals like the Leipzig Book Fair as well are now promoting comics in a literary context. We also have in Germany a number of exhibitions which have shown comic art alongside so-called fine art, showing the dialogue and appropriation going on between the two. This is also I think important because people need to realise that the art world will occasionally borrow and blow-up and distort and play with the icons and characters and stylistic approaches of comic characters and artist, but in many ways the dialogue is more interesting in the opposite direction, where you see what comics take from fine art, what they can use to actually develop their artistic styles, their sequences, their illustrative approaches. It means that there’s an enormous wealth of material that can be brought from fine art into comics. [...]