JAZAM! Vol. X

A few days ago, the new volume of German indie comics anthology extraordinaire JAZAM! came out. As usual, I'm one of the editors and publishers and did all of the editorial design and a short comic for it. Not so usual: as this is our tenth(!) volume, the entire book is in color! And it has this amazing cover by Sascha Wüstefeld:

You can have a peek inside the book over at MyComics.de

Here's the first page of my own four-page comic contribution:

And here's where you can buy it: Kwimbi | JAZAM! Shop

At Kwimbi, you can also order my new mini comic book "Love & Monsters" in German & in English!

Hipsters vs. Lesung (Berlin edition)

If you missed last month's reading in Dresden and happen to be in Berlin next week, you get another chance to see Katja, Tim, and me doing a live Hipsters reading.



The reading will be on Tuesday, April 14, at 8:00 pm, at Buchhandlung Montag in Prenzlauer Berg.

Here's the Facebook event.

And the trailer (for the Dresden reading):

The reading is part of the COMICINVASIONBERLIN 2015 satellite program. JAZAM! will have a table at the CIB main event on April 18/19. Come and visit us!

Love & Monsters

After a long, silent gestation period, suddenly a lot of my projects are ready to hatch.

You may remember that last year, I published a 24-hour comic called "Offline Dating". You may also remember that I mentioned a sequel to said comic, which came into being during the most recent 24-Hour Comic Day in Leipzig in September of 2014. Well, now I'm finally done coloring the sequel and am about to put out a little book containing both parts of "Offline Dating". The book will be called "Love and Monsters", and this is the cover:

As you can see, there will be both a German and an English edition.

You'll be able to get these at various comic conventions and, presumably, at Kwimbi. But first, I have to wait for the printer to actually deliver them. With any luck, they'll be ready in time for the Leipzig book fair in March.

Here's a work-in-progress/sketch version of the cover:

And here's the first page of "Offline Dating 2":

Hipsters vs. Lesung

Have I mentioned that there will be a big Hipsters reading in Dresden next month? It's on March 8 at "Sabotage" Dresden at 6:00 pm. Have a look at the Facebook event for more details.

If you can't make it to Dresden, there's a good chance there will be another reading in Berlin in April or so!

To promote the reading, Katja, Tim, and I shot a live-action trailer! The weather was much shittier than expected and we kind of froze our asses off, but I think it still turned out pretty well! Watch it here:

Some behind-the-scenes photos:

HIPSTERS chapter illustrations

I haven’t posted anything in a while, but I haven’t been idle. There’s a lot of stuff coming up!

To sweeten the waiting period, here are two of the chapter illustrations from my HIPSTERS book:

Madness

A few weeks ago, I was invited to draw a cover illustration for a regional Berlin magazine called Maulbeerblatt. Which is totally unrelated, but fitting to my move to Berlin this past weekend. The issue's theme was "madness," so I drew this:

Here's what it looks like without the title etc.:

Berlin is great so far, by the way!

Comic Collab: Black and White

It's Comic Collab time again, and this month's topic is "Black and White." Fortunately, this also coincides with #inktober, so I made a little something that works for both of these events (because I'm lazy).

It's nothing special, really, just a little ink drawing of two of my Hipsters characters:

Check out all of the cool stuff the other Comic Collab artists made:

• Schlogger
• Isla Volante
• Sylvaroth
• Skizzenblog
• Rainer Unsinn
• BTW
• Comic Creator Conspiracy
• Kritzelkomplex
• Adrian vom Baur
• Pepperworth
• Team-O
• Dramatized Depiction
• Schisslaweng
• Katrin Felder
• Doppeltim
• Hillerkiller
• Pandago
• Flausen

Beetlebum guest comic

Superstar webcartoonist Jojo "Beetlebum" Kretzschmar is on vacation in New England for a little bit, and asked some of his lesser known friends to draw guest comics for his blog while he is away. Since I only know New England from Stephen King novels and didn't have much to say about it, I made a comic about autobiographical webcomics instead. Or, more specifically, about why I don't (usually) make them.

I decided to draw the whole thing non-digitally, but kind of chose too small of a format and am not that happy with the results. Anyway, here it is (German version only):

24HCD Strikes Again!

A week ago, I once again went to Leipzig to draw a 24 hour comic with some of my dearest cartoonist friends. To mix things up a little, I decided to pre-script the comic this time. I originally thought this would save me some time, but the opposite turned out to be the case: because the script was so long and wordy, I had to fit more panels onto each page and more dialogue into each panel, thus requiring a lot more time and effort.
When it became clear that I couldn't finish it in time, I decided to just finish the lettering and scribbles and leave the pencil inks for later. That way, I at least managed to have 24 pages on the wall, even if many of them weren't quite final. In the week since, I've already finished most of them, but you're gonna have to wait a little while longer to read the comic, because I want to color it and then probably publish it in a little book together with Offline Dating, to which this one is a direct sequel.

Here are some work-in-progress pics you may have already seen on my Instagram or Twitter:

2015, Fuck Yeah!

Once again, the inimitable Schlogger called upon all German webcartoonists to make another exceptional illustrated calendar. This year, 69 artists participated - one for each week, plus some bonus illus.

I got the last week of July and drew this:

You can already pre-oder the calendar at Kwimbi. (You can see some of the other illus there)

Affection Play's First Album!

I don't have much new comics & illustration stuff to show you right now, but I've got something else: my band's first album! In case you didn't know: I'm the singer & keyboarder, and write most of the lyrics.

We originally recorded these songs two years ago, but the mixing etc. took a little bit longer than expected. Anyway, it's done now, and can be downloaded from Bandcamp (pay what you want!) or listened to at Soundcloud.

I designed the cover art, too.

If you like the music at all, please follow Affection Play on facebook!

Reading in Leipzig

On September 6, I'll be at the Comicgarten Leipzig, selling & signing some comix at the JAZAM!/Mondo table. If all goes well, I should have some copies of the 2nd printing of "48 Stunden Angst" by then.

If the Comicgarten alone isn't a good enough reason for you to come to Leipzig, I will also participate in an awesome comic reading that night. I will be reading "Hipsters in Hell" (probably a bigger chunk of it than in Erlangen) and "C'est Angoulême, bitches!" - almost all of the artists from the latter will be there, each one reading their own part. All of them will also be reading some of their own comics.
I really enjoyed the reading I did in Erlangen and got a ton of positive feedback, so I'm looking forward to doing it again! Let me know if you have any ideas about where I could do more Hipsters readings.

Info about the when & where can be found on this cool Flyer by Hillerkiller:

The Hipsters book, once again

Wait... you still don't have a copy of "Hipsters Versus..." yet? I'm talking about this beauty:

Here's one of the brand-new chapter illustrations from the book. There are three more like this one in it!

And here's where you can buy it: Kwimbi | JAZAM! | Amazon.de | Hummelcomic

If you have a comic shop, you can get it via PPM. If you are a regular customer at a comic shop, please ask them to order it!

Also: if you want to review it, do an interview, a podcast, an article, a signing, a reading, or whatever, please let me know!

24h comic: "Offline Dating"

Last April, I went to Leipzig to draw my third-ever 24-hour comic. I blogged about it at the time, but being somewhat busy with JAZAM! vol. 9 and the Hipsters book, I never got around to actually showing you the comic. These last few weeks, though, I had some free time on my hands, and so I scanned and colored it and uploaded the comic to facebook, twitter, and tumblr, one page at a time.

Now that I'm done, you can read it in one piece, all 24 full-color pages, either in German on facebook, or in English by clicking on the following image:

#SailorMoon

Yesterday morning, Schlogger and nine other German webcomic and manga artists published this neat Sailor Moon homage art collab pic, inspired by the new Sailor Moon Crystal tv show:

But then, my friend Doppeltim was peeved about not being asked to participate in the project, and posted his own Sailor character on twitter. Not long after, Jojo "Beetlebum" Kretzschmar and myself had joined him, kicking off an avalanche of Sailor Moon-inspired self portraits that were added to the original pic. Here's the three of us:

And here's what it looks like now, approximately one day later:

The meme is still going strong on Twitter right now. Check #smfmp to see more recent ones.


EDIT: Beetlebum is now compiling hi-res versions of all the characters here: