Award winners and finalists
Comic Book Award 2023
The 2023 winners of the Berthold Leibinger Comic Book Prize are the father-daughter duo Maren and Ahmadjan Amini from Hamburg. The prize is endowed with EUR 20,000.
About the award winners
In the award-winning volume "Ahmadjan and the Hoopoe," illustrator Maren Amini tells the story of her father, inspired by the tale of the "Conference of the Birds" by Fariduddin Attar (1136-1220). Juror and longtime publisher at Edition Moderne David Basler describes the plot as follows: "Ahmadjan's world in the Panshirtal in Afghanistan is in shambles. The good things in life, faith and art, you can't enjoy all that with a growling stomach. That's why Ahmadjan has to go away, far away." And justifies the award of the winning volume: "following a parable, the author Maren Amini tells the story of her father, born in 1953, in beautiful pictures reduced to the essentials. His fate is at the same time an impressive contemporary testimony of Afghanistan and the emigration to Germany." In addition to the life events of Ahmadjan Amini, the volume leads through many exhibitions of the artist, showing artworks full of life.
The winning volume is a very important and personal project for the winning duo. "We want through the comic, to remember an Afghanistan that consisted of social and cultural diversity. We want to honor Afghan roots, come closer as father and daughter in artistic dialogue, and as artists, we don't want to silently accept that the Taliban is once again destroying Afghanistan's culture."
The volume is expected to be approximately 200 pages and completed by fall 2024.
Father-daughter duo
Maren Amini was born in Hamburg in 1983. She studied illustration and is a member of the Hamburg cartoonist group "Hamburger Strich", as well as the Hamburg and Berlin cartoonist collective "SPRING".
The artist Ahmadjan Amini was born in 1953 in Malaspa in the Panjshir Valley, has lived in Hamburg since 1980 and studied computer graphics there for a diploma.
The finalists for the 2023 Comic Book Award are:
Janne Marie Dauer convinced the jury with "Auerhaus". Stefanie Stegmann, director of the Literaturhaus Stuttgart and jury member, explains the decision: "The deepest Swabian province of the 1980s: in her comic "Auerhaus" Janne Marie Dauer takes us into a farmhouse flat-sharing community inhabited by six teenagers who try to create a livable environment for their friend after a failed suicide attempt - and, as if incidentally, for themselves. The comic is based on the novel of the same name by Bov Bjerg and illuminates the existential upheavals of the six damaged youths in a way that is as tragic as it is funny. The decision to use pencil and gouache independently puts into the picture what the text suggests: The lives of these six young people are anything but firmly outlined or drowned in color, but drawn and colored with both fine and quick strokes-as if in draft mode, temporary, unfinished, open, tender, and fragile."
"Helpless" is what Wanda Dufner's teenage main character Noemi calls the book's choice of title about her experience, "but then, so am I." The artist brings her own experiences of an unwanted teenage pregnancy into the scenarios and finds an overwhelming visual language for the events. Perspectively, everything here is out of bounds. This fits perfectly with the paths of the heroine, whose turmoil is accompanied by laconic, very direct lyrics. The reactions of those around her, experienced as "problematic" at the time, are a central theme. An inkling of reconciliation resonates here - a forgetting, never. Artistically and in terms of content, an extremely promising undertaking," is how Brigitte Helbling, jury member and journalist, justifies the award to Swiss Wanda Dufner with "Herr Lehrer, ich bin schwanger!"
Andreas Platthaus, chairman of the jury and responsible editor for literature and literary life at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote about "Pink Monster" by Claus Daniel Herrmann: "Emancipation meets esotericism in this comic, which tells the story of a young man who experiences his gay coming-out parallel to a family crisis situation: In order to help the depressed father, the mother seeks support from a religiously based nature mystic, who counters all deviations from the supposedly God-ordained life by conveying feelings of guilt. In order to rid himself of her, the young man must jeopardize his relationship with his parents. In Claus Daniel Herrmann's portrayal, he becomes an all-around positive identification figure."
Andreas Platthaus justifies Inga Lankenau 's award for "Die Welt brennt und ich häklechen Bäbysöckchen" with these words "The form of this comic is as unusual as can be imagined: Different graphic styles, impressions and associations contrast with long dialog passages of a woman in conversation sometimes with herself, sometimes with another young mother. One notices Inga Lankenau's familiarity with theatrical forms in her essayistic, scenic and asynchronous narration. Political awareness results from the personal view of children, political images grow out of private words."
"In her comic book "Madame Hanako - The Life of a Japanese Dancer,"Yuka Masuko, a graduate of the Burg Giebichenstein School of Art, projects her own experiences as a Japanese immigrant onto the real life of the woman who, as an actress and dancer, brought Kabuki theater to a European audience between 1902 and 1921. Hanako's encounter with Auguste Rodin, who depicted her in the largest of his sculpture cycles in the form of face masks, portraits and busts, had a lasting effect. Over this narrative, shaped by exoticism and Japonism, the author blends currently pressing questions of interculturality, foreignness, and discrimination in an unagitated and discreetly colored visual language that reflects Japanese traditions." Congratulates Frank Druffner, Deputy Secretary General of the Kulturstiftung der Länder and jury member.
"In his work "Collines" Constantin Satüpo (Konstatin Potapov) approaches an improvised camp of the Parisian drug scene between and under the roadways of the "Périphérique" on the northern edge of the city: "Colline du crack". A lucid view of social conditions underpins the delicate tracing of everyday life in the camp. The fact that Satüpo lets images and lettering oscillate between watercolors, gouache, and colored pencils reinforces the work's hovering between documentation and fiction. And through the foggy gray-black of life's fates, pale shades of blue and pink always shimmer...", Florian Höllerer, director of the Literary Colloquium Berlin and jury member, explains the jury's decision.
Mikael Ross with "Lichtenberg". Journalist and jury member Barbara Buchholz writes: "Black hatching and gray grids, speed lines, obliquely cut panels, onomatopoeia and snappy speech bubbles - Berlin-based Mikael Ross reaches unerringly into the toolbox of dynamic comic art to tell his thriller "Lichtenberg" in an appropriately fast-paced way. The main characters are Mi, a schoolgirl, and her brother Dennis, children of Vietnamese parents. The two help a young Vietnamese woman who has been abducted and managed to escape from the clutches of her kidnapper. Thus the siblings themselves become the target of organized human trafficking, and this in the middle of their home district of Berlin. Against a gritty real-life backdrop, Ross propels his gripping story about streetwise teens - the pages at hand leave you wanting more."
"With "The Cooking Monkeys"Tine Steen has presented a comic that is at the same time an entertaining textbook in the best sense, a cookbook, a cultural history. Her texts are clever and humorous, her drawing style rough, wild, and so exhilarating that you wish you already had the finished book in your hands so you could finally devour it whole, just as the chimpanzee in her pictures licks the wandering ants off the branch." This is how Teresa Präauer, jury member and writer from Vienna, justifies her decision.
Likewise, the ninth finalist work also convinced Teresa Präauer: "Tiere richtig zeichnen" by Lena Winkel is humor for the smart nerds among us. She pairs insider knowledge about animal theory and human-animal studies with anecdotes, quotes and philosophical questions, always reflecting on the medium of comics. That the thinking comes across so easily is thanks to her wit, her quick stroke and her amusing characters.
