The Forbidden Planet International Blog

It was the Erlangen Comics Salon at the weekend, the pre-eminent comics event for German language comics, which may not yet enjoy quite the cultural cache comics do in France and Belgium but seems to be increasing its influence among readers and yeilding more and more interesting creators the rest of the comics world should be paying attention to. As part of the festival the prestigious Max und Moritz awards were given out for the best works in German language comics. As we blogged previously when noting the shortlist a few weeks ago the great Lorenzo Mattotti was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement award – richly deserved, in my opinion, Mattotti is one of those incredible artists I know I will pick up pretty much any book he works on without knowing a thing about it simply because he created the art.

The rest of the winners at Erlangen were:

Best German comic artist

Isabel Kreitz

(Tokyo scene from Die Sache mit Sorge by Isabel Kreitz)

Best German comic book

Packeis by Simon Schwartz, published Avant-Verlag

Best international comic book

Gaza by Joe Sacco (Translation: Christoph Schuler), published Edition Moderne

Best comic strip

Schöne Töchter by Flix, published Der Tagesspiegel

Best comic book for children

Das tapfere Prinzlein und die sieben Zwergbären by Émile Bravo (Translation: Ulrich Pröfrock), published Carlsen Verlag

Best student comic publication

Ampel Magazin by Anja Wicki, Luca Bartulovic and Andreas Kiener, published
Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst

Special jury prize

Rossi Schreiber for her pioneering work and a great adventure as a comics publisher

Audience Award

Grablicht by Daniela Winkler, published Droemer Knaur

Our own Kenny was over there as both comics fan and in his Blank Slate capacity and hopefully he’ll be giving us a few thoughts on the event in the near future, so stay tuned.

Update: meanwhile Howard Hardiman was there too with Lizz Lunney and he’s already posted up some thoughts on Erlangen – I’m particualrly struck with his description of the way smaller presses not only take on new creators (as we’d expect) but are also happy to help them move on to larger publishers when they break big, with those same artists continuing to still do some work for the indies when they have a more unusual, non mainstream project, what a lovely way of working it (then again look at Jeff Lemire, doing excellent work for a major like DC but still putting out other work through Top Shelf, so I guess it exists in other markets too):

“When we arrived, we were shown around by Stefan from Zwerchfell Verlag. He told us about almost every one of the stalls, then told us about the cross-overs and collaborations where one publisher helps out early-career artists, then they happily help them to find deals with larger and richer publishing companies, which then means that the artists come back to them to do more left-field projects that might be too risky or niche for the larger companies.”

(Lizzy Lunney at Erlangen, pic borrowed shamelessl from Howard’s blog)