Graphic Novel

Slideshow

“Hey, let us out of here!” yell two siblings as they stand behind the closed doors of a museum. “Regulations are regulations,” replies the over-zealous museum guard, sticking firmly to instructions and refusing to let the young pair out of the building. The much-cleverer boy and his pubescent sister are trapped. Trapped in a labyrinthine and mysterious museum whose exhibition rooms suddenly come to life at night. In their search for a way out, the sibling duo wander through room after room, floor after floor, and have many a strange encounter in the exhibition landscapes of the natural history museum. Amongst the recreations of tropical forests, Easter Island and pixellated computer worlds they meet Father Death, Ernst Jünger, Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. The Hamburg-based comic book artist Sascha Hommer conceived the newspaper strip together with Jan-Frederik Bandl, publicist and literature studies academic, and the series has appeared daily in the Frankfurter Rundschau since 2007. The protagonists of the cartoon strip are sent by their authors through a history of the world and time, through cultural and artistic landscapes. Bandel and Hommer combine surreal and fantastical moments with topical political comment and quotes from popular culture. The protagonists of the cartoon strip penetrate ever deeper into an absurd parallel world in which white rabbits show the way and caterpillars smoking water pipes offer good advice. Traces of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland and Hugo Pratt’s epic Corto Maltese as well as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are to be found everywhere. The laws of logic are skewed and the reader has to quickly abandon any concept of time and space.

In 2001, Sascha Hommer made his way from the Black Forest to Hamburg to study illustration with Anke Feuchtenberger at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften. Hommer had harboured a desire to illustrate comic books from his earliest childhood. “When I arrived in Hamburg I thought there were bound to be some great student magazines around and that all I had to do was dive in and get cracking. However that did not turn out to be the case.” Taking the initiative, Hommer set up the comic anthology Orang, in which he published his own stories under the pseudonym Pascal D. Bohr. The series of publications, including contributions from international guest-writers, are published by Kikipost, which he set up with Arne Bellstorf. Since then Kikipost has built up a strong core of comic book artists including Line Hoven and Moki. This ensures that alongside Berlin, Hamburg has become one of the most interesting and active comic book scenes in Germany, with exhibitions and publications that garner considerable international interest.

Hommer’s figures are small and stocky, with over-large heads and a curious appearance. They could certainly not be described as cute as Hommer is interested in outsiders and people living on the edges of society. In one interview Hommer said, “Losers are always interesting: people like reading about other people’s misfortune. This was certainly the case with Charlie Brown.” Even in Hommer’s debut comic book Insect the protagonist Pascal is different to his playmates because, as suggested by the title, he is an insect. Initially the differentness of the boy remains unnoticed as the city he is growing up in is under a thick pall of smog. Pascal lives and grows up like a normal boy: he goes to school, meets friends and is in love with a classmate. As the protective cloud of smoke evaporates, he has no clue what is going on. All at once his environment changes, his friends become his enemies and proceed to tyrannise and exclude him. Pascal withdraws, flees the city and finally finds acceptance from new friends who do not care what he looks like.

With his melancholy stories Sascha Hommer directs the reader’s eye to the outsiders in society, to those who are different, whose true character is quite unfairly not taken seriously. Hommer’s reduced drawing and storytelling style emphasises the unconventional atmosphere of the world of his comic books. He is the master of the quiet tone and the subtle voice, which allows him to communicate the essence of his stories in an impressive and enduring manner.