Anke Feuchtenberger's Somnambule

Anke Feuchtenberger is a German graphic designer and comics artist. In a recent interview by Mark Nevins (European Comic Art, Volume 2, # 1, Liverpool University Press: 65 - 82) she talked about her influences (67, 68): "Well, I grew up in East Berlin, in a house full of art books. My father was a graphic designer, and my mother was an art teacher. So rather than children's books, I spent a lot of time looking at art books. These were strange books for a five-year-old girl, things like the posters of John Heartfield, books about Käthe Kollwitz and Rodolphe Töpffer, and collections of paintings from the Italian Renaissance. My father had a lot of catalogues from the 'Poster Biennales' in Warsaw and Finland, and I loved to look at those posters. I also really liked the work of some of the Renaissance painters, especially Matthias Gruenewald [sic] and Hieronymus Bosch. Those images filled my imagination every day. [...] One of my early very serious experiences with art came when I was 15 years old. I got up all my courage and visited a female painter I adored, and I showed her my drawings. Her name is Nuria Quevedo [http://www.galerie-berliner-graphikpresse.de/?page_id=153]. She's Spanish, and was in exile in East Germany." Anke Feuchtenberger also says, in the same interview, that she doesn't like Picasso's work. That's strange though: Nuria Quevedo's influence is easily traceable in Feuchtenberger's style, and Picasso's influence is also easily traceable in Quevedo's paintings. Quevedo did serious caricatures like, for instance, Chago Armada. I wonder if that's one of the usual features in Second World graphic artists. Maybe José Alaniz's book on Komics (comics from Russia: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1199) will talk a bit about the subject. I also wonder who started doing that? My bet is Pablo Picasso, but I could be wrong (George Grosz and Saul Steinberg are other possibilities and Paul Klee and William Steig come to mind... but maybe Gus Bofa is the real name to cite here; I guess that an historical investigation is in order...). Anyway... there's a thin line between caricature and expressionism... It would be very difficult to determine which expressionist drawing is no longer expressionist, but a "serious" caricature and vice-versa... Besides, who can say for sure if William Steig's lonely ones (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942: http://tinyurl.com/ygcwhln ), for instance, are funny or "serious," or both?...
Talking about one of her most famous books, with Katrin de Vries (Die Hure H, Jochen Enterprises, 1996; W the Whore, Bries, 2001), Anke Feuchtenberger seems to confirm the idea that her work may be labeled "feminist" (ditto: 81): "Her name [Die Hure H] should create fantasies about danger, pleasure, sexuality, and so on. We used the character as a door which opens up wide possibilities for thinking about the female body, the history of the female body, and the opportunities for a woman in society [...]."

The "message" in "Die see jungfrau" (the young woman from the sea, according to my translation: published in Die kleine Dame - the little lady -, Jochen Enterprises, 1997), a story also written by Katrin de Vries (and inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "Den lille havfrue," the little mermaid, published in Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, fairy tales told for children: C. A. Reitzel, 1837), focuses on the politics of the female body. Unfortunately I don't speak German, but it seems to me that the young woman from the sea refuses her identity and wants to be a normal (or should I say: standardized) woman. In order to become one she doesn't hesitate to bleed to death because she cuts her fish tail in two.
Anke Feuchtenberger's Somnambule (an almost wordless book, by the way; Jochen Enterprises, 1998) goes the other way around destroying the simplistic feminist labeling... Here we can find one of Feuchtenberger's more recognizable visual metonymies: the detached (flying) head (strangely enough this is the second time that this metonymy appears at The Crib: the first one it belonged to - with some differences nonetheless - Edmond Baudoin). In "Gewächs haus," the greenhouse (a story inspired by Katrin de Vries), a man is the victim because, even if he tries to fly away using his propeller head, he can't do it. Two women keep him captive shaping him in their way, planting him, really (hence the title).

These stories are about power and domination, about killing what one loves (it's the mystery of the vowels again: another link to Edmond Baudoin: cf. my post about him). To confirm everything that I said so far you may read/see "Blind Schleich Song," something like "blind creep song," acording to an internet translator (a story that's part of Somnambule), here: http://www.feuchtenbergerowa.de/gal.htm (a male human caterpillar tries to flee using his head propeller, but the human female bunny character doesn't let it; the caterpillar's head detaches itself from the body functioning as the moon, or a night light; in order to read this story you just have to think about the caterpillar as a stage before a metamorphosis occurs - the body turns into a butterfly - and a head detaching from the body as a sign that the latter can be imprisoned - in this case: prevented from growing up -, but our imagination can't be contained; even so, the head loves the bunny because it stays with it nonetheless).

It downs on me now that this post should have been called something like: Anke Feuchtenberger's and Katrin de Vries' beautiful stories... The latter isn't really the author of Somnambule, but she greatly influenced Anke Feuchtenberger's work during the mid to late nineties.

She also deserves to be in The Crib's canon.

Anke Feuchtenberger's site: http://www.feuchtenbergerowa.de/

Anke Feuchtenberger's and Stefano Ricci's boutique publishing house: http://www.mamiverlag.de/

A bio: http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/com/cav/cpf/enindex.htm

Images:

Somnambule's wraparound cover cut in two halves like the see jungfrau's tail (Jochen Enterprises, 1998): our old selves are falling behind us all the time while new ones are born...

PS Feminists are, to me, the best critics of mainstream comics writing today. This happens because, being mostly male, other critics overlook misogynous messages and buy every stupid fantasy that passes for art in mainstream comics. That said I strongly endorse a visit to this particular post ("Bingo: The Callers Enclue You") in Karen Healey's blog:

Girls Read Comics and they're pissed:
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Lynda Barry's The Most Obvious Question

Do you remember when the Masters of American Comics exhibition's curators were accused of sexism? (Los Angeles: The Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art: November 20, 2005 - March 12, 2006) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_44/ai_n18764244/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

The above Art Forum article (April 2006, XLIV, No. 8) by Sarah Boxer tells it all; I chose two quotes:

"[Invoking Little Nemo's mother: women are] the creatures that shake you out of fantasyland. No wonder they're not allowed in the clubhouse."

"Two frames from Jimmy Corrigan say it all. One shows a dull cityscape with a tiny bit of color, a caped superhero about to take a flying leap from a tall building. The next frame shows the tiny colored bit splattered on the ground. That's one small step for a superhero, one giant leap for comics."

Priceless!

Fifteen artists were chosen and not one of them was a woman. Plus: Sarah Boxer continues with the same accuracy demonstrated above: "from McCay to Schulz [...] the main characters are boys or men: Little Nemo, the Kin-der-Kids, Wee Willie Winkie, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Terry, Steve Canyon, Charlie Brown." I would add that gender doesn't matter to me as much as genre: there's no doubt that we're in fantasyland. Feminist critics, by the way, are almost the only ones to challenge the babymen status quo in comics.

I don't advocate some kind of positive action in the arts, but, in this case, Lynda Barry is the blatantest absence from this people's (John Carlin, Brian Walker, Cynthia Burlingham - a woman! -, Michael Darling) epitome of mastery.

Ernie Pook's Comics (later: Ernie Pook's Comeek) was Lynda's first comic. It was published by her pal Matt Groening and John Keister in the newspaper of the University of Washington. Ernie Pook's had two phases: first it was about male / female relationships; later it was about childhood. Lynda Barry explained the change in an interview with Thom Powers (The Comics Journal # 132, November 1989: 66 - when will this mag interview her again?, if I may ask...): "my hand started to really hurt when I drew, so I had to use a brush instead of a pen, and there was something about using a brush that made it so I couldn't draw that same kind of [editorial strips] [...]; they just didn't look right in brush to me. [...] When you start to work with a brush, the drawings start to look retarded, and the retardation, the natural retardation that comes from using a brush, sort of made my writing get retarded. [...] In kind of a nice way. Like one of the first strips in which the voice that I use now appeared in is "What Is Friendship?"

Lynda Barry is known for including a lot of words in her strips. I don't understand the comics milieu's logophobia, but it was demonstrated once again when Art Spiegelman invited her to participated in Raw. Lynda, in the same interview (74): "Art said "Try not to make it so top-heavy, with so much writing." I almost started laughing, because that's my work: it's really dense and it has lots of words." Even so she seems to have complied, "The Most Obvious Question," Raw vol. 2, # 3 (Penguin Books, 1991) has a caption in every panel (it's Maybonne's voice in "voice over"), but I'm certain that there are captions in Barry's oeuvre with a lot more text than here. The inner narration is a counterpoint to the outside world shown by the images. Against expectations, though, it's the supposedly subjective words that are cold, distant, desensitized, slightly ironic and the supposedly objective images that blend everything in a fuzzy web of curves, hatchings and cross-hatchings.

Searching for a golden age when her family was happy (we always lose our paradises) loveless Maybonne fakes the gestures of love (Lynda Barry hides Maybonne's eyes behind her glasses, underlining her alienation, except in one panel in which she remembers a blissful scene). Her mother achieved the next level: she doesn't even bother anymore.

Images:

horror stats by the Guerrilla Girls, Washington Post, April 22, 2007 (detail): http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/washposthorror.shtml ; "What is Friendship?" comic strip, parts one and two, has it was published in Everything in the World (Harper & Row, 1986).