Ich Bin Ein Komicker! I Really Am Running Out Of Titles.

Back in the late 1980s I was trying to interest various German comic companies to take projects that I was working on.  As a youngster in Germany I saw the out-put of Bastei, Kauka, Williams and so on but apart from Disney comics and Kauka, everything tended to be, as I later found out, Franco-Belgian with a little British and even Spanish mixed in.  Except for the Marvel reprints (oddly, I do have a few DC reprints but I never saw that many.

 

 

Three characters I loved, and I don’t think that is a secret to regulars of CBO, were  Wastl der Superkraftlackl mit dem goldenen Herzen -aka “Jerome” , “Angus” etc.- from the Willy Vandersteen created Suske en Wiske.  A, uh, German super hero created by a Nederlander.

 

Then there was Mykros: Die Kampfer Der Titanen by Marcel Navarro (writer) and the fabulous Jean-Yves Mitton on art.  French.

 

This was followed by Photonik again by Navarro and the artist was another great -Cyrus Tota. So, uh, French.

Prsonally, I never understood it.  Yes, kids were interested in the funny animals and Westerns -I don’t think interest in Westerns ever faded in Germany.  

 

Of course, this all led to my creating D-Gruppe: Deutschland’s Erste Superhelden Gruppe and while I was talking to a Bastei editor in…1989(?) I mentioned this and he said he had seen the strip in the TV/film/comic/fantasy fanzine Watcher , published by Stephen Dohr.  Quite a bit of my work had seen its way around German zinesters and the editor told me -Gerd Hammer calls you “The Father of German super heroes!”   Even to this day I have no idea who Gerd Hammer was (possibly someone at Bastei?).

 

I couldn’t let that go without a pitch and the first was for, obviously, D-Gruppe.  He liked the mix of super hero, sci-fi and fantasy that I put forward.  Yes, briefly, Bastei was c0nsidering publishing a German super hero comic!

 

The other pitch was for the series The Cosmic Fulcrum which I gave the rough German title of Kosmisch Stützpunkt.  This was nothing really to do with the original Black Tower Cosmic Fulcrum but a new story -this became Return Of The Gods: Twilight Of The Super Heroes  which ran in BT Adventure nos. 1-6.  And it featured an international cast including German heroes.

 

Everything was underway and by the time the first issues were done and dusted it looked all go.  Then silence.  I later learnt that Egmont had bought out Bastei and cancelled a great deal and editors were told they could not phone or write to creators -it was “wasted money” and so it all ended!

 

I thought it probably worth publishing myself as a Small Press comic but there were quite a few complications.  And no one in the comic fan community seemed interested in German super heroes…had I actually just gone ahead and ignored the negative “arties” I might have gotten somewhere as it seems the first adventure of D-Gruppe -The Revenge Of The Ice Queen- that had been published in Watcher was much photocopied and handed around, particularly in the then East Germany!

 

Of course, these days the comic would need a better translation than I could give it.  I wonder how things might have gone or developed had eith D-Gruppe or Kosmisch Stützpunkt been published by Bastei?