The fantastic, multi-layered and sometimes political world of comics

He tumbled into the fantasy and fun world of Franco-Belgian comics on a family holiday in France, when he was five. He was fascinated by the exploits of the swashbuckling Western cowboy Lucky Luke, the tomfoolery of the Thompson Twins and the adventures of Blake and Mortimer, an atmospheric thriller series.

Many decades later, Berlin-based Ralph Trommer turned his childhood passion into a career by becoming an authority on graphic literature (comics, graphic novels and manga). The 51-year-old comics expert and author, who studied the Art of Animation Film and Screenwriting at Potsdam Film University near Berlin, was in Bengaluru to conduct a masterclass on the history and art of the graphic novel at the annual City Scripts festival at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements. The festival focuses on the creative exploration of cities and public spaces.

Trommer, who comes from Europe where comics are celebrated as the ninth art, explains how comics are “visual literature” with a rich, long history dating back to the 19th century. It is this history that he largely talks about, starting with what might be the first ever real comic by Swiss cartoonist and caricaturist Rodolphe Topffer. These are short, brilliantly sketched black and white cartoons with speech balloons, and are really the precursors to the modern comic. But one of the stunning samples of that time are the highly imaginative and well-crafted pictorial broadsheet narratives with short verse texts of the great German artist and humorist, Wilhelm Busch. We are introduced to his iconic series Max and Moritz on two young rascals, which first appeared in 1864.

“The satiric, rhyming verse which accompanies the amazing portrayals inside the panels are excellent, and even modern,” says Trommer, who is clearly a devoted fan. The simple plot revolves around the tricks the two pranksters play on people in the village. They kill the widow’s chickens and fill up their teacher’s pipe with gunpowder, but finally meet a dark and gory end at the hands of a miller. (No comic relief here!) The boys, however, became so popular that they inspired a German cartoonist, Rudolph Dirks, to create a comic strip on another naughty pair of boys titled the Katzenjammer Kids in the Sunday edition of the New York Journal. By the end of the 19th century, comic strips had become staple fare in American newspapers.

By 1905, another great talent popped up on the newspaper comic strip, says Trommer. It was American cartoonist Winsor McCay, whose most famous creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, graphically captures the surrealistic dreams of a young male protagonist. Set in the backdrop of a big city, in one story strip, the tall buildings on a street develop long legs and demonically close in on the boy and his mate. Before they are crushed to death, the boy falls off his bed and wakes up. It is only a dream. 

So, when did comics get real? It was in 1929, says Trommer, with the entry of the lord of the jungle — Tarzan (adapted as a newspaper comic strip from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan of the Apes). In the ’30s, the masked, mysterious Phantom; Jungle Jim and the nemesis of evil; the intergalactic explorer Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond dominated the landscape. And, by 1938, the superheroes had swooshed in to save the world. In the first comic version, Superman was superfast and mighty but he could not fly, and in the earlier versions, Batman and Spiderman were fighting real villains like Hitler. 

Incidentally, Trommer’s favourite comic hero happens to be the spinach-chomping, heavily muscled sailor boy, Popeye, who turned 90 last year. Popeye was created at the same time as Tintin in 1929. “I like him because he’s fantastic, funny and beats up stupid people,” says Trommer.

Comics became an industry only with the arrival of the fearless and famous Gaulish warrior, Asterix, and the lovable Obelix. Also, a wave of horror, sci-fi and crime stories had entered the frame. But not before humorous tales of Spirou and Fantasio and cowboy Lucky Luke, who can shoot faster than his own shadow, had captured the imagination of kids and adults alike in the 1940s. 

Indians are only too familiar with the imaginary city of Gotham in Batman comics but Trommer says that Franco-Belgian sci-fi comics by Jean Giraud (Moebius) have created even more fanciful, mind-bending and futuristic visions of cities. 

“In The Incal, which Moebius illustrated, the pictures are explosive, unconventional with indescribable stories situated in a futuristic city. He is one of this generation’s best artists,” affirms Trommer, giving other examples of comics with cities in the background like Will Eisner’s fictional Central City in his The Spirit series and French cartoonist Jacques Tardi’s adventure series, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, set in pre-World War 1 that always captured quaint and interesting facets of Paris.

For Trommer, the first best graphic novel, a literary comic strip was, however, sketched by a Venetian master illustrator, Hugo Pratt. He created the cult figure of Corto Maltese, a rakish looking sailor who prefers freedom and imagination to wealth. “For the first time, abstract elements were introduced in comics, which had a dreamlike quality,” Trommer observes. “The styles were elegant and artists were using less lines. In one comic, Pratt gets philosophical in a dialogue between the protagonist and a leopard.”

A comic strip from Der Boxer | Reinhard Kleist, Carlsen Verlag Hamburg 2013

By the end of the ’80s, another talent came to the fore: American author and illustrator Art Spiegelman’s holocaust narrative, Maus, based on his parent’s experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. It was a compelling and dark comic, portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, and it went on to become a bestseller. 

Introducing politics in comics is not uncommon, says this comics aficionado. “In the 1990s, we had the provocative, subversive anti-racist comics by Robert Crumb. In 1934, in Tintin’s The Blue Lotus, Hergé made a political statement against Japan’s aggressive policies towards China. But this was because he had a Chinese student, who was helping him to learn about China and their culture. Hergé, however, received a lot of criticism for this,” recounts Trommer. 

Trommer is full of admiration for the fine and expressive work of Paris-based Lorenzo Mattotti; Edgar P Jacobs for his memorable Blake and Mortimer detective series; the New York-based immigrant stories of American comic book artist, Will Eisner, widely regarded as the pioneer of the graphic novel in its classic sense; and Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco’s reportage on inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in his comic books.

Sacco’s drawings are actually journalistic reports of conflict zones like Palestine. “It is factual but creative too in many ways and is filled with satirical humour,” he says.

Among the new generation of comic artists, he regards German cartoonist Reinhard Kleist as one of the best for his biographies of not just musicians like Johnny Cash and Nick Cave but also for chronicling — in a graphic novel, Knock Out! — the life of a gay boxer who was stigmatised for killing a fellow boxer in the ring in 1962.

It’s an intriguing peek into the fantastic, energy-packed kingdom of comics teeming with finely etched, timeless characters.