Comics about losses: That's grief, that's the way it has to be

Grief in the comic. Are more often, but is usually episodic. A sad passage in the chapter, a sad chapter in the book. Two graphic novels, on the other hand, go right to the point. They focus on grief, not fictitious ones, as when Leonardo Di Caprio drowns in "Titanic" - but real grief over real events experienced by the authors themselves. Tina Brenneisen, 42, describes in "The Light, the Shadow Empties" the loss of her unborn child. The Frenchman Luz, 47, processes the death of his colleagues from the satirical magazine "Charlie Hebdo" (as well as his survival) in "We were Charlie". And in both cases one can first ask: Can Luz and Brenneisen do that at all?

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Clear answer: yes. Private anyway, is a free country, everyone is allowed to draw for himself what he likes. But is that allowed to be thrown on the book market? Equally clear answer: of course. One then only withdraws his grief for the protection of the piety - and releases it for evaluation. What used to be a private matter may now be criticized. So: Is there a good mourning here? Is mourning bad? Is howled? And how much?

Edition Modern

Tina Brenneisen: What else is there for you?

With Tina Brenneisen, awarded the Berthold Leibinger Prize 2017, according to media reports a lot. No wonder: Even on the third page, Brenneisen has her dead son brought to the hospital bed to say goodbye to him. Personally, this is probably one of the bitterest things you can experience in a hospital. Dramaturgically, the decision is athletic: One of the strongest moments, if not the strongest already on page three to place - that certainly does not leave cold, but one wonders already, what is to come there.

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Tina Brenneisen
The light empties the shadow

Publishing company:

Edition Modern

Pages:

240

Price:

EUR 29,00

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Luz begins with a dream: He, who accidentally missed the assassination five years ago, comes into the teeming, lively editorial staff of "Charlie Hebdo" and starts to work. But nobody understands him, gradually the editors go and leave him behind until he wakes up in bed. He gets up, opens a beer and thinks. What makes the novels comparably well: From here both work very chronologically. Luz shimmies, repeatedly interrupted by the blackness of the night, episodically through his past in the troupe of "Charlie Hebdo". Brenneisen describes her grief for her son just as constantly. The effect, however, is amazingly different.

Luz never loses sight of the reader

Luz's plan is pretty obvious: he wants to bring the many-headed editors to life. We should learn to differentiate the draftsman and feel the sense of community that united them as a team. This is tricky, because first of all, a lot of people worked for "Charlie Hebdo". And secondly, most readers are neither journalists nor draftsmen. The tide-like recurring state of emergency of a newspaper before Andruck is hardly mediated outsiders.

But the project succeeds. Luz shows his colleagues drawing, drinking, quarreling over the smoke-free office, and doing the smooth jogging (one erasures, everyone shakes the table). The debates about the best gag for the cover picture, special peculiarities, abilities (secretly blind drawing in the pocket). The crude, tail-heavy sayings, the quiet and the less glorious moments: At a comic congress, the satirists give a mentally handicapped a portrait, which shows him with a baseball cap, "Yes to abortion!" This is past all pain and taste limits, but it also shows exactly the spontaneous brute force with which "Charlie Hebdo" struck in the political field - Luz never loses sight of the reader.

Alain Bujak / Reprodukt

Luz: Describes lovable pigsty

Without a big bang

With Tina Brenneisen, on the other hand, one may doubt whether the reader was ever in the field of vision or a comparable plan existed. After saying goodbye to her son, she returns home. There everything is reminiscent of a wonderful future that will never come. Unfortunately, all these facets are not only open and ruthless, but also tiresome.

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Because they are all the same open, equally ruthless, equally spread and sometimes charged with as much verbal pathos, as if Brenneisen found, otherwise they would not be tragic enough. In the relationship it is talked about, at therapy, with friends, alone, long and wide and longer and wider. Alright, that's sadness, that's the way it has to be. You have to talk about it until the friends can no longer hear it, the family can not hear it until you can not tell it yourself anymore, what else is there to you when life is so merciless?

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Luz
We were Charlie

Publishing company:

reprodukt

Pages:

320

Price:

EUR 29,00

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But what the author does well does not automatically help the book.

It's not a huge spoiler to reveal that Brenneisen's story ends with a more hopeful view of the world than it begins, with a look that would have been built 50 to 100 pages earlier thanks to the funeral barrage. And Luz? He too stops without a big bang. The assassination does not take place, he stays behind, he does not even reveal who died on January 7, 2015. But because Luz 'readers have now become so thoroughly acquainted with the lovable pig, before Googling he realizes that he does not want to lose any of them. Of course, Luz achieves that too because the murdered draftsmen, unlike Tina Brenneisen's son, had a life to remember.

Also, but not only.