Image Era

Exciting news! Viennese publisher, luftschacht, will be releasing Regina Hofer’s BLAD in February of 2018. More details on publisher’s website.

Ulli Lust’s new book is out now from Suhrkamp. 

Blad is the autobiographical story of the Austrian artist Borretsch and her experiences with disordered eating. The word ‘blad’ is Austrian slang for fat or bloated. Published in Perpetuum in 2008, the work is also available for download at electrocomics. 

Katharina Greve’s Das Hochhaus has been published with Avantverlag. In the comic, the floors of an apartment building are tied together through the complex relationships of the tenants. Online rivalries, symbiotic relationships, hidden affairs - all shed light on the seemingly incongruent yet deeply related phenomena of compartmentalization and interconnectedness in contemporary urban life.  Only in German, for now. More information here . 

This project that I contributed to in 2015 was published last month by Lexington Books. Edited by Lynn Kutch, it’s a collection of essays on German comics and graphic novels. I love the cover art and am really excited that my first published work is part of such a beautiful book. 

Today, May 7, 2016, is my birthday. And through an awesome coincidence, it’s also Free Comic Book Day. Many US comics shops are participating and even some here in Berlin, such as Grober Unfug, are offering five free comics to visitors as part of the promotion. I stopped by and picked up some special issues of Love and Rockets, Avengers Civil War, Suicide Squad and 2000 AD. As a gift for a friend, I also grabbed a copy of Frank Flöthmann’s Grimms Märchen ohne Worte, a wordless adaptation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Huge thanks to Free Comic Book Day and all the participating stores for organizing such a cool event!

http://www.comicinvasionberlin.de/

Haus Schwarzenberg Rosenthalerstraße 39 10178 Berlin More information available here.

Some graphic novel highlights from 2015.

Spring Magazine Buy Spring Issue #12

All images are copyright Sophia Martineck.

Hemispheres is an innovative crowd-sourced graphic novel project based out of Potsdam. Now near completion and raising funds through social media, the graphic novel contrasts different ways of life and visions of the future. On the one hand it characterizes the “hyper-capitalist” mega-city of the future: a mecca of economic productivity and police brutality.  On the other hand, the story shows a secluded buddhist monastery, which seeks reprieve from the materialist values of the era. As a whole, the graphic novel is intended as a discussion and intervention in present day discourses on the ecological, economic and social implications of our way of life and its trajectory into the future. 

A long time ago I created a wiki page for Ulli Lust. Lust is one of my favorite authors and illustrators. She’s won a bunch of awards and has been translated into many languages. Her best known book is Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, a semi-autobiographical travel novel about a trip through Austria and Italy. Her recent graphic novel Flughunde is an adaptation of the original novel by Marcel Beyer. It focuses on the daughters of WWII minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. 

I created a wiki entry in English for Reinhard Kleist. Kleist is one of the most important and productive cartoonists in Germany today. His most recent book, Der Traum von Olympia, is about the Somali runner Samia Yusuf Omar.

The first illustration from Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle or Liber Chronicarum. The book was published at the end of the 15th century and chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the era of its publication. It is one of the first books to creatively integrate text and image, by wrapping text meaningfully throughout the hundreds of woodcuts it contains. It’s available for free from the University of Heidelberg: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/is00309000

Germany pledges 2 mil. € for comics research

http://www.haaretz.com/life/books/jerusalem-international-book-fair-2015/.premium-1.640316