Tanja Esch: "Boris, Babette and lots of skeletons"

Babette is - actually what? An animal, a talking rodent with a penchant for horror, potato chips and crime movies. Tanja Esch tells the story of Babette in an original way, with humor and an undercurrent of seriousness, and transports us into a small family drama that in many ways reflects the tragedy of a world that has gone off the rails and is marked by uprooting and alienation. The anti-heroine Babette is accompanied by nine-year-old Boris, who unexpectedly becomes her anchor figure and is initially somewhat creeped out by her strangeness. Babette, who previously lived in the gloomy and macabre room of goth Lynnette, feels very uncomfortable in his room. She needs horror and skeletons! The story of how, despite rejection, intrigue and depression, she ultimately finds herself in an environment worth living in thanks to Boris is told in appealing pictures. Esch's idiosyncratic drawing style and her script appeal to both children and adults - and the jury is looking forward to the finished comic book.

-Frank Druffner

Celia Espona Pernas: "Pension Tapioca"

"Pension Tapioca" is simply very funny: these strange characters who move into their rooms in the pension are made more of pineapples, geometry and soft ice cream colors than flesh and blood. Their conversations have a banal, out-of-this-world quality. You just want to read on and keep watching

-Teresa Präauer

Sascha Hommer: "The Cold Heart"

As an author, illustrator and organizer, Sascha Hommer is a driving force in the Hamburg comic scene. But he comes from the Black Forest, and that is where his current comic project "Das Kalte Herz" is set. Hommer translates Wilhelm Hauff's famous fairy tale material into his typical style - and into a mixture of fantasy and reality, home and eeriness, which makes the question of the topicality of this story irrelevant: "What is told with such wit and finesse is timelessly good."

-Andreas Platthaus

Rina Jost: "WEG"

Malin follows her sister Sybil, who has turned into a stone, into a fantastic world and is confronted with strange creatures and her own helplessness on her journey. In the comic project "Weg", Rina Jost tells a story about depression from the point of view of a relative, and despite the gravity of the subject, she does so with a light ink stroke and affectionate humor. The fluid narrative in the style of a heroine's journey and the skillful graphic realization won over the jury.

-Barbara Buchholz

Josephine Mark: "Trip with drip"

A terminally ill rabbit who has just started chemotherapy saves the big bad wolf from the hunter and his dog Horst. With a lot of humor, speed and sarcasm, the story shows how a friendship can develop out of a community of fate while fleeing from the hunter. An extremely successful comic with anthropomorphic animal figures that manages to make us laugh and dream despite the sad subject - cancer.

- David Basler

Natalie Ostermaier: "Haruki"

As an entry, Haruki is a fragmentary affair - a collection of manga-esque layouts and image templates that come across more as a sketchbook than as continued comic pages, the short story of a former fellow student, Franz Horath, which is the aim of the comic, a description of Ostermaier's engagement with the chosen material. None of these three approaches would have been enough on their own to make it to the final round. Together, however, the excellently crafted illustrated pages, the spaced-out short story template and certainly also the announced, unconventional examination of the subject matter resulted in a promise that won over the jury. We are eagerly awaiting the realization of this unusual project.

- Brigitte Helbling

Sandra Rummler: "Be ready"

The jury was presented with the first completed volume of a series (according to the artist); atmospheric cityscapes in different styles with a beautiful depth effect, partly overlaid with semi-transparent foils, in combination with flat, colorful elements - the characters of the plot, a cat, a peacock and other deliberately highlighted objects. The image sequences are situated on the edge of the picture book; not the first comic to move in such an "intermediate world". The hand-lettered text tells of the GDR shortly before (and after) the opening of the Wall, it stays with the main character Mo, with children's impressions of a radically changing world, and last but not least, it is the narrative continuation of this world view, combined with the impressive aesthetic presentation, that we are most curious about with this finalist.

- Brigitte Helbling

Franz Suess: "Thieves and laymen"

The loosely linked episodes that Franz Suess tells in his comic project "Thieves and Laymen" are bizarre, not exactly cheerful, but blackly humorous, wicked and exciting. Suess clearly has a soft spot for characters on the fringes, bringing them to the fore in his painterly drawings. In addition to the graphic strength, the sequential narrative is by no means inferior: the atmospheric sequences of images with their gloomy, luminous color moods work, even without text on several pages.

- Barbara Buchholz

Kerstin Wichmann: "Fathers"

The graphic essay "Fathers" by Kerstin Wichmann tells of a family search for traces of fathers from different generations and also questions concepts of masculinity in general and their persistence and forces of change through the generations. The delicately colored drawings are not only based on his own memories and family stories, but also include materials such as photos, postcards and letters, supplemented by general research on the First World War. Drawn in pencil and colored in crayon, the cautious approaches result in atmospherically dense and concentrated scenes that quickly convinced the jury to award this remarkable volume.

- Stefanie Stegmann