I, ANIMAL

In Grimm's fairy tales or in modern comics, animals play a very important role. They may be heroes or anti-heroes, foes or friends. The ways they are portrayed often serve as an image of human characteristics, feelings and thoughts, of desires, fears and values. The stories of animals who behave like humans invite us to reflect on the real, everyday coexistence of humans and animals. The comic, as an extremely popular medium, offers particularly impressive depictions and has made a star out of the anthropomorphic animal figure.

Whether it's the hapless Donald Duck, the lazy, gluttonous Garfield or the wolf from the comic series Fables, which harks back to Grimm's fairy tales, animals make their mark on the comics in their own characteristic way and to a very significant extent. Original drawings, sketches, studies and merchandise demonstrate the range of animal characters, their different roles and (human) quirks. They also provide an insight into the history, illustration techniques and the humour of comics, from their predecessors such as the 19th century printed picture stories down to the present day.

Here it is possible to find traces of stories dating back thousands of years, such as Aesop's animal fables. In a chapter on the Nature of the Animal Fable, Jacob Grimm describes the art of finding just the right degree of humanisation of animal figures – by balancing the mixture between the original animal characteristics and the added human traits. The exhibition shows how this art has been skilfully practised in the medium of comics. It inspires reflection on relationships between humans and animals and gives visitors the opportunity to create their own comic strip and transform themselves into an animal – from the Big Bad Wolf to Donald Duck!

Under this symbol, you will find short texts in each section of the exhibition that summarise and describe the contents of the exhibition. They provide information on a wide variety of comic characters – from Donald Duck and Garfield to Wolverine and many other comic heroes. They all have one thing in common: they are animals. They often behave in a very human fashion – and they also look different from animals in real life. The exhibition uses many examples to show how animals are portrayed in picture stories, what characteristics they have, and what roles they play. You can also transform yourself into an animal and tell your own comic strip story.

"WICKED", "CLEVER", "CHEEKY": MATCH THE ANIMALS TO THEIR DESCRIPTION!

Animals in fairy tales are clever, cunning, malicious, evil – often they symbolise human characteristics. Some of their ascriptions can be found in common sayings, so that they have become part of people's collective memory. Even outside the world of fairy tales, animals struggle with prejudices that are influenced not least by popular media such as fairy tale books and film adaptations, comic books and animated films, online games and social media content.

The animal in the fairy tale is sometimes the friend of the human, and sometimes an enemy. It supports or outwits other fairy-tale characters, takes on the leading role itself or changes into a human being. There are many descriptions of animals in the Brothers Grimm's collection of fairy tales.

Can you match all the animals to their characteristics?
Hang the two matching tiles next to each other!

Fox - Tomcat - Donkey - Frog - Wolf - Wolf

useless - nasty - wicked - cunning - greedy - cheeky

Solution:

In the 19th century, the medium of so-called "illustrated broadsheets" experienced a tremendous boom. These were single-sheet prints with pictorial stories. New printing techniques enabled large print runs (10,000 copies or more, depending on the popularity of the subject). This reduced the selling price and made the broadsheets accessible to wide sections of society who were still largely illiterate. However, the colouring of the sheets was still done by hand. The centres of production were in Alsace, Neuruppin in Brandenburg and Munich: Wilhelm Busch (the author of Max and Moritz) worked regularly for the Münchener Bilderbogen, for example. Other artists included Moritz von Schwind, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and his student Eduard Ille. Ille created a total of 71 Münchener Bilderbogen, including Reineke Fuchs, based on the well-known medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, which Jacob Grimm also studied intensively. Von Schwind focused on legends and fairy tales; his illustrated broadsheets include, for example, Puss in Boots: the first edition in 1850 comprised 10,000 copies.

The illustrated sheets depicted attractive themes such as historical events, exotic journeys, and uniforms. Fairy tales and fables were also very popular, especially those stories that were already familiar to the audience. Well-known stories by the Brothers Grimm – such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Frog King – were told in illustrated sheets. They were not only intended for entertainment, but also had an 'edifying' purpose, as they adhered to a moral code and portrayed social values.

A process of emancipation was already evident towards the end of the 19th century: anthropomorphic animals began to appear more and more frequently in fictional stories. The traditional canon of fables was broken, and pictures with hidden objects were introduced, in which humans were replaced by animal characters. Human conflicts, such as a marital dispute, were illustrated by transferring them to an owl family. Nonetheless, despite all these new liberties, the stories were still supposed to be 'edifying'. This meant that the humour had to conform to a general social and moral code. In layout, the images and the text remained separate, so that the pictures served primarily as illustrations of the verbal narrative.

200 years ago, illustrated broadsheets were very popular for telling stories with the help of pictures. In those days, there were no mobile phones, no internet, television or radio as there is today. Fairy tales with animal figures were particularly popular, for example The Frog King or The Town Musicians of Bremen. The stories were often intended to serve as role models, and there was an edifying message at the end. Gradually, more and more stories developed, far beyond the familiar fairy tales. Above all, these new stories were intended to be entertaining and not just educational.

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE (1621-1695) | JEAN-JACQUES GRANDVILLE (1803-1847) | GUSTAVE DORÉ (1832-1883)

After antiquity and authors such as Aesop (5th century BC), it was in 17th century France that the genre of the animal fable was decisively modernised. It was the author Jean de La Fontaine who was responsible for this, for he placed the poetic retelling of fables in the centre of his literary work. His fables were in several ways better than the ancient Latin tales: they were compact, full of tension and humour, and composed in the French vernacular. This not only extended the social radius of the fables; La Fontaine's stories also had a much higher entertainment value. La Fontaine shifted the focus more towards small animals such as frogs and rats. The large animals tended to represent the powerful and rich, while the small animals were role models for the "common people". Comic figures such as Donald Duck are also very much in this tradition: a duck just like you and me.

The most famous illustrator of La Fontaine's fables was the Frenchman Gustave Doré almost 200 years later. They are impressive works of art, but they depict the animals in a very naturalistic way.

Another French illustrator was more influential in developing the anthropomorphic animal figure into a comic: Jean-Jacques Grandville. He used the vocabulary of the fable, but reinterpreted it in such a way that the emphasis was no longer on general moral rules but on specific social conditions of the time. Thus, in the broadest sense, Grandville created political caricatures, whose message was conveyed by hybrid creatures both animal and human. Furthermore, at the end of his short life, he portrayed his human-animal hybrids in mysteriously strange worlds, so that he was seen in the 20th century as a precursor of surrealism.

Fables are short stories, some of which are thousands of years old. The main characters are often animals that act and speak like humans. Like the illustrated broadsheets, fables are often intended to be edifying. In the past, the language of these stories was complicated and difficult to understand. However, the French writer Jean de La Fontaine used everyday language for his fables. They were easy to understand for many people and also very entertaining. It was the many little animals in his stories that were particularly popular. The French artists Gustave Doré and Jean-Jacques Grandville interpreted these fables in pictures.

BENJAMIN RABIER (1864-1939) | EDMOND FRANÇOIS CALVO (1892-1957)

In the 20th century, two illustrators in particular continued the fable tradition of La Fontaine and Grandville: Benjamin Rabier and Edmond François Calvo.

Rabier not only illustrated La Fontaine's fables, but also created a whole host of classic children's books featuring animals, above all his most popular character Gédéon the duck. Although Rabier never made the final step to comics, he transferred his anthropomorphic animals to animated films and, above all, to advertising as early as the 1910s: his famous laughing red cow for France's first processed cheese, La vache qui rit, is still one of the best-known product icons in France and beyond.

Calvo also began his career drawing illustrations for books that maintained the traditional separation of image and narrative text. His masterpiece and best-known album was the two-volume story La bête est morte! (The Beast is Dead), in which he used animals to retell the story of the Second World War at a time when Hitler's Germany had not yet been defeated. The Nazis were wolves, the French were depicted as squirrels and rabbits, animals that symbolise hard work and peaceableness. The intervening Americans were prairie buffaloes. Walt Disney was so enthusiastic about Calvo's books that he would have liked to persuade him to work in his studio. However, Calvo preferred to stay in post-war France, which had in some parts suffered serious damage, and then turned explicitly to comics. Animal heroes remained his means of expression: for example in Cricri souris d'appartement (Cricri, mouse in the flat) or Moustache et Trottinette, a team of cat, mouse and dog, which Calvo imagined in various historical ages. One of Calvo's greatest admirers was the young Albert Uderzo, illustrator and co-author of Asterix.

Many artists depict the old, well-known fables and fairy tales. Sometimes the animals are portrayed very realistically, sometimes they are artistically alienated to look quite different from the originals. The Frenchman Benjamin Rabier not only drew animals to illustrate fables, but also for children's books and advertising, for which animals are also very popular, as can be seen today in many examples. The artist Edmond François Calvo also drew animals as the main characters in comics about European politics and history.

At the end of the 19th century, American daily newspapers began to add supplements to their Sunday editions to make them more attractive. This had a lot to do with the fact that more and more people did not have to go to work on Sunday and were looking for entertaining leisure activity. This led to the birth of the comic, the first visual mass medium in history.

This development was accompanied by a technical revolution: with modern printing presses, it was now possible to print millions of copies in a single day. In addition, the comic supplement was given a unique selling point, a kind of "special effect" that excited people: it was printed in colour! The gigantic circulation figures also reduced the sales price so that everyone could now afford a newspaper. Around 1900, reading a newspaper was swiping on a smartphone today.

The fact that this development took place in the USA was also significant. Capitalist America succeeded much more quickly and decisively than the Europeans in arriving in the modern age and throwing the cultural and moral ballast of the 19th century overboard. In short, they completely rethought the pictorial narrative of earlier days. The most important innovations were the following:

• Thanks to the invention of the speech bubble, there was no longer a narrative text accompanying illustrations, but rather a dialogue. For the readers, it was as if they were present when something funny or exciting happened.

• The comic established serial characters; there was not a new cast each time, but familiar figures who returned repeatedly. This created identity and established comic heroes as constant companions in real life.
• Increasingly, animal protagonists lost their metaphorical meaning as mythical creatures. The animals in the comic strips could simply be cute or stand in for humans, without supposedly following an educational purpose. This created a completely new type of humour, a humour that was self-sufficient: slapstick.
• For the first time in history, the newpapers' gigantic print runs and extremely low prices created a democratic mass medium as a "consumer culture". There was no longer any need to "save" a "valuable" picture. Consumption could now be fleeting, because a new comic would appear on the very next Sunday (and then quite soon every working day).
• The new medium of comics shot up from zero to pole position in the entertainment industry, many years before film took off in a similar way. The early comic not only made the publishers into millionaires, but also the illustrators.

The history of comics began more than a hundred years ago and developed primarily in the USA. The first comic strips were printed in newspapers. More and more people read newspapers. They became cheaper over time and contained colour illustrations. People looked forward to the comics from week to week, and later from day to day. Their animal heroes became better known and more popular. They became more and more detached from their predecessors in fairy tales and fables. The stories became less edifying, funnier and more entertaining.

BUGVILLE

The entire 19th century was marked by large waves of emigration from Europe – in particular from Germany – to America. Germans, mostly from rural regions, were hoping for a better life in the USA than they had at home in the German Reich: economic refugees! Among them were the Dirks from Heide in Schleswig-Holstein, who settled in Chicago with their seven children in 1884. In the following years two of their sons, Rudolph (born 1877) and Gus Dirks (born 1881), proved to be artistically gifted and loved drawing. In 1897, the elder boy Rudolph decided to try his luck in New York, which was one of the most important centres of the newspaper industry in the world, alongside Paris and London. And he was indeed lucky. He was able to get a job with newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, for whom he drew the comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids from December 1897.

It was probably at the end of 1898 that his younger brother Gus followed him to New York. He landed an even bigger coup, drawing for both market leaders on the American newspaper market, Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. At Easter 1900, when he was only 19 years old, he was already allowed to design the front page of the comic supplement of the New York World. While Rudolph concentrated on human figures, Gus invented a humanised insect world, which he called Bugville ("bug town"). This caught on with the readership. Insects, which were generally regarded as dispensable pests, suddenly took on a whole new, "sweet" dimension. Down in the grass, in hollow trees or rotten fruit, the insects held summer parties or weddings, delivered the post, or came as firefighters when a beehive caught fire, just as an apartment block in New York did almost every day. The insect kingdom became a micro-image of the human world, with all its highlights and shortcomings.

Gus Dirks' career unfortunately only lasted a very short time, less than four years. In June 1902, Gus shot himself in the head out of despair at an unhappy love affair with his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Rudolph. He was only 21 years old. His name was quickly forgotten, but his work was not. Many other illustrators, including Walt Disney, took up his idea of depicting insects with human features. The fact that original drawings by Gus Dirks have survived down to the present is something of a minor miracle.

When Gustav Dirks was three years old, his family moved with him from Germany to the USA. As an adult, he became famous there as Gus Dirks. His cartoons were widely published in American newspapers. His stories from Bugville were particularly popular. Tiny creatures such as beetles, snails and caterpillars came into the limelight, experiencing events just like humans – summer parties, fire fighting, or weddings.

KRAZY KAT

The American George Herriman is regarded as the most important comic artist of all time and his strip Krazy Kat as the most complex work of comic art ever created. But it all started so modestly: in his daily comic strip The Dingbat Family, Herriman introduced two animals into the family household in 1910 – a cat and a mouse. Their hunting scenes at the feet of the family members became hugely popular with the public. From 1913, the animals (which now included a bulldog) were given their own strip: Krazy Kat – a blueprint for all later series of this kind, such as Tom & Jerry from 1940.

When publisher William Randolph Hearst wanted to start an additional Sunday page in 1916, Herriman outdid himself and invented something that was visually and textually on a par with the visual arts and literature of the time: surrealistic, Dadaist, absurd theatre full of rhymes, puns and quotations. Some of the enthusiastic readers were the American President Woodrow Wilson as well as the writer T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso in Paris, who had the newspaper cuttings brought from New York by Gertrude Stein.

At the centre of the story are the three principal animal characters: firstly Krazy Kat, a black cat who is the epitome of goodness and kindness. Krazy Kat's counterpart is Ignatz Mouse, a spiteful little mouse full of unbridled rage. The third in the group is Officer Bull Pupp, a bulldog in police uniform. All three of these animals behave contrary to their proper nature. Krazy Kat is not busy chasing the mouse, but loves it adoringly and unconditionally. Ignatz Mouse, on the other hand, is not on the run, as a mouse should be, but is always in angry assault mode, epitomised by the brick he throws at Krazy Kat's head again and again. And the police bulldog also behaves atypically. In keeping with his nature, the dog should be constantly at loggerheads with the cat. But Pupp, for his part, is madly in love with Krazy Kat, although he has to recognise that this affection will never be reciprocated. So from now on at least, Pupp sees his life purpose in protecting Krazy Kat, i.e. preventing the brick-throwing and putting the mouse into the tiny jailhouse before he can carry out his plan. This twisted (and yet also very human) triangle of misguided loves, unfulfilled longings and strong emotions – whether from love or wrath – is the ridiculous basic theme which Herriman retold in almost 1500 versions as a Sunday page for various newspapers. In addition, there were almost 10,000 strips in daily papers.

A lovable cat, a mouse who seeks to quarrel, and a dog who likes to keep things tidy – these were characters that only played supporting roles in the comic at first. But they were so popular that they soon became the main characters. We are referring to the comic Krazy Kat by George Herriman. There are no humans here. But the animals behave very humanely – and often differently than expected. Sometimes they even draw something themselves in their comic strip, or erase something that doesn't fit in with their own plans.

MAGNETIC BOARD

Good picture stories are created through the art of drawing and storytelling, by visual and body language, the facial expressions of the characters, onomatopoeia, speech bubbles, and the composition of images and text. It is necessary to have a feel for colour effects, perspective and changes in perspective. A sense of humour and the dramaturgy of a story are also essential.

The comic tells stories using a sequence of pictures. The individual picture is called a "panel". The connection between the individual "panels" is created by the text and the reader's imagination. You can invent a story involving the magnetic figures and decide what they say to one another. You can create your own comic strip right here on the magnetic board!

WALT DISNEY (1901-1966) | FLOYD GOTTFREDSON (1905-1986)

In 1927, Walt Disney and his friend and business partner Ub Iwerks stood at the gates of the Universal Pictures studio lot and cursed. Within just one year, they had made a success of their character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, created for that film studio, and now – after disagreements about their fees – they had been shown the door. Their contract with Universal stipulated that in the event of a dispute all rights to their character would be transferred to the producers. Disney and Iwerks had delivered their creativity and had now become superfluous.

Their anger was all the greater because something similar had happened to them before. In 1922, they had invented the character Julius the Cat for another studio and made it a success. However, all of these newly created characters were up against the unrivalled market leader on the big screen: Felix the Cat, a feline character created by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer in 1919. Felix the Cat established a new type of film comedy, whereby the type of animal depicted was completely irrelevant. All the successors were modelled on Felix's look: black body, white face, which contrasted as much as possible with the white background and allowed plenty of facial expressions.

Felix the Cat was still the measure of all things in 1928, when Disney and Iwerk created a new character. They modelled it on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and simply shortened the rabbit ears to those of a mouse, from long and narrow to short and round. Mickey Mouse was born! In order to avoid accusations of plagiarism by Universal Pictures, Mickey Mouse was soon equipped with white gloves and large shoes. The first black and white short film with the new mouse was called Steamboat Willie and celebrated its premiere in 1928. Steamboat Willie was the first animated film in history with sound and music, so that it immediately shot past the competition. A new age of sound film had begun, and a new star was born.

So in 1928, a mouse laid the foundations for the Disney empire, and just one year later, media mogul William Randolph Hearst asked whether it would be possible to create a comic strip based on the films for his newspapers. Disney liked the idea because it would bring him additional income to expand his studio, and he sent staff to work for Hearst. From 1930, Floyd Gottfredson drew a Mickey Mouse strip which was not only humorous but focused on exciting adventures in instalments. Gottfredson remained loyal to Disney and the Mouse for the next 45 years, setting new standards in entertainment in comics.

In the 1930s, everything at the Disney studios was dedicated to a new, even greater goal: the creation of the first feature-length animated film. The time finally came in 1937 with the premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, which became a sensational worldwide success.

Mickey Mouse is presumably one of the most famous mice in the world – and has been for almost a hundred years. He was then featured in the very first animated film with sound and music. It only lasted a few minutes, since 24 individual frames had to be drawn for every second. It took almost ten years and an immense amount of work before the first full-length animated film could be shown: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm. In this film, animals are important companions of the main character, helping Snow White, protecting and comforting her – all without speaking.

CARL BARKS (1901-2000)

Carl Barks was born on a farm in Oregon. From an early age he had a hearing impairment and received little schooling. So he spent the first half of his life in one back-breaking job after another: Barks was a lumberjack, a steel rivet setter in a freight car repair shop, a messenger boy and finally editor of a sleazy men's magazine. Then in 1935 he read an advertisement in the newspaper for a job at the Walt Disney Studios and was indeed taken on after a trial period. Barks had always been good at drawing and had a strong sense of humour, which predestined him to work on Donald Duck short films.

Health problems with a new air conditioning system at Disney Studios, and the economic turmoil of the Second World War forced Barks to quit his job in 1941. But just a few months later, he was back in the service of the Duck, as Western Publishing was desperately looking for an illustrator to transfer Donald Duck's success on the big screen to the medium of the comic book.

Thus 1941 saw the beginning of a 25-year success story that was unrivalled and was to fundamentally change the world of comics. One man, Carl Barks, single-handedly created an entire universe of anthropomorphic animal characters: Duckburg! When Barks began his work on the comics, the films knew only Donald Duck, his three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and Donald's eternal girlfriend Daisy. All the other characters – and the world around them – were created by Barks: Scrooge McDuck, Gus Goose, the Beagle Boys, Gyro Gearloose, the witch Magica de Spell, the Money Bin, and so on and so forth. That Donald is a duck was given because of Disney, who had created him in 1934 as a chattering counterpart to the quiet Mickey Mouse, but Barks was free to choose all the other animals: nasty politicians or Scrooge McDuck's adversaries are often pigs, the Beagle Boys are obviously dogs, and Gyro Gearloose is some kind of bird that cannot be defined more precisely; fans speculate that he is a chicken. What is special, however, is that it hardly matters which animal provided the model. Carl Barks' fanciful world is so suggestive that we believe that we can see in it a human world. And a Western world at that, because Barks hardly misses an opportunity to poke his finger into the wounds of capitalism and imperialism. The fact that Donald Duck comes so close to us "as a person" has a lot to do with the fact that he is doomed to failure. He has to fight hard for his little bit of happiness, often loses out, but doesn't lose his dignity in the process: "The duck has become human."

Barks was so talented as an illustrator and storyteller that circulation figures soared to unimagined heights. During the 1950s, comic books featuring Barks' stories were consumed by 12 million Americans every month. However, Barks' publishers concealed this success from him and left the only moderately paid workaholic in isolation at home. And there's another bitter pill: 97 per cent of the original illustrations were destroyed. After printing they were simply thrown away. Out of about 6,700 pages that were drawn by Barks, barely 180 have survived.

Fortunately, Carl Barks lived long enough – he reached the age of 99 – to realise how big his fan base really was and what a literary genius the world considered him to be. New, younger Donald Duck cartoonists, however, had to ask themselves how they should deal with this crushingly perfect legacy. It was hard to imagine how the Duckville cosmos could be expanded, so the motto seems to be to follow the big footprints and keep Barks' world alive as humbly and creatively as possible.

DAAN JIPPES

The Dutchman, born in Amsterdam in 1945, is a genius in his own right, as he is capable of reproducing almost perfectly the drawing style of other illustrators, above all Carl Barks. Jippes was therefore always the first choice when it came to drawing Barks stories for which the master had only written the scripts, or redrawing stories for which not only the originals but also the artwork had been lost.

WILLIAM VAN HORN

Born in 1939, the Californian could hardly believe his luck in 1988, when he was offered the opportunity to draw Donald Duck stories. To get everything right, he switched to the same large paper format which Barks had used and meticulously prepared each page with a separate full-scale pencil drawing. This enormous amount of work could never be covered by the price the publisher was prepared to pay for a page. But that didn't matter to Van Horn. He owed Barks the perfection he was striving for.

ARILD MIDTHUN

The classic Donald Duck comic book series in the USA (comparable to the Mickey Mouse books in Germany) came to an end in 1984. A revival by a new publisher finally ended in the USA in 2017, and since then the independent European Disney licence holders in Denmark and Italy have been supplying the world. One of the most talented of the more recent Donald Duck illustrators is the Norwegian Arild Midthun, born in 1964. He has his own expressive style and feels very much at home in Barks' cosmos.

Carl Barks started out as a comic artist at Walt Disney Studios, where he worked on short Donald Duck films. He later drew the duck for comic books at a publishing house. Barks’ drawings played a major part in shaping Donald’s character – the hapless, nattering duck in a sailor suit. Carl Barks is seen as the creator of Scrooge McDuck, Gus Goose, Gyro Gearloose, the Beagle Boys and other inhabitants of Duckville.

GRANDVILLE

Bryan Talbot is considered one of the most important representatives of British independent comics and a pioneer of the British graphic novel. But he is also a master of genre themes: from 2009 to 2017, Talbot published five volumes of the furious, more than 500 page long steampunk saga Grandville, a captivating mix of Sherlock Holmes story, hardboiled noir thriller and nostalgic science fiction in the tradition of 19th century novels by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. The term "steampunk" refers to a genre of science fiction literature that combines 19th century technology and aesthetics with futuristic elements.

Talbot’s Grandville takes place in a world in which Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. England is oppressed by the victorious French. Nevertheless, in pursuing his cases Inspector LeBrock from Scotland Yard – who is a badger – repeatedly has to travel from London to Paris, the "Grandville". He is accompanied by his colleague Ratzi, a rat with a monocle, who like (almost) all the protagonists in this world takes the form of an animal. There are a few humans, known as "doughfaces", who lie at the very bottom of the social scale. They have no civil rights and are not allowed to travel. Animals are therefore not portrayed as passive objects of human power or subordination, but as self-confident beings superior to humans.

In addition to various variations on the fable tradition, Talbot uses his comic for a wide range of social issues reflecting our present-day world. Powerful tech oligarchs (embodied by lizards and toads, led by a T-Rex) attempt to usurp government power, sectarian Christians follow their messiah, a white unicorn, and yearn for a new Nazi state. This places Talbot's fable firmly in the present day, right down to bombing attacks and military robots.

There are lots of animals in Bryan Talbot's comic Grandville: from the T-Rex and various lizards to penguins, ducks, rhinos and a unicorn. The main characters in this crime thriller are a rat and a badger who work as detectives in the British police force. Humans hardly play a part in this story – and they are called "pasty faces".

In 1937, Walt Disney put all his eggs in one basket and broke new ground by taking the risk of bringing a feature-length animated film to the big screen: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became a worldwide success. However, the successor projects, Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), flopped and plunged the Disney studios back into the red. Pinocchio was no lesser masterpiece, but the audiences found the subject matter too cheerless, while Fantasia was too ambitious from an artistic point of view. This meant that Disney remained uncontested in the field of feature-length animated films for decades, since other studios just considered the economic risk too great.

However, when it came to short films shown in cinemas as supporting films, the situation was completely different. Here, Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck faced strong competition, especially from the films made for Warner Bros. – directed and produced by such exceptional talents as Tex Avery (1908-1980). Nobody questioned the idea of taking animals as protagonists or wanted to see animated humans instead. So Warner Bros. created under the overall title of Looney Tunes new anthropomorphic characters, which everyone still recognises today: Porky Pig (1935), Daffy Duck (1937), Bugs Bunny (1938), Tweety the canary and Sylvester the cat (1945) as well as others. The MGM studio (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) also produced cartoons to be shown before its main films, creating classics such as Tom and Jerry (1940) and Barney Bear (1939).

Like Disney, the other film studios tried to introduce these heroes into the comic market, selling licences for their characters to the print sector. This was a win-win situation: the popularity of the characters at the cinema brought customers to the comic publishers, while the comic books kept interest in the characters alive until their next screen appearance.

During the 1950s, the media landscape changed as television began its triumphant advance. For the major film studios, this was a welcome opportunity to re-utilise their old short films in the context of cartoon shows on TV. However, they now also had competition from studios that were producing new material directly for television consumption. The most successful of these were the two animators William Hanna (1910-2001) and Joseph Barbera (1911-2006), who had invented Tom and Jerry for MGM in 1940. They opened their own company in 1957 and landed their studio’s biggest hit with the animation The Flintstones (1960) – after all, a cartoon with human protagonists. At the same time, they went on to enjoy further success with animals: Huckleberry Hound (1958), Top Cat (1961) and, much greater, Yogi Bear (1958). The rivalry between the walking bear with a hat and the human ranger Smith in Jellystone Park delighted audiences all over the world. It is therefore not surprising that Yogi Bear not only appeared in comic books, but also became a successful comic strip in newspapers in 1961 at the time when his own TV show of the same name was launched. The strip was first written and drawn by Harvey Eisenberg, then by Gene Hazelton: a success story that lasted more than 20 years.

In the 1930s and 40s, Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck featured in cinemas as short films before the main show. Animals were very popular main characters, such as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweety the canary and Sylvester the cat, as well as the cat and mouse Tom and Jerry. Television became increasingly important in the 1950s and made Yogi Bear famous, for example, a character who loves to help himself to people's picnic baskets and thinks he is much cleverer than ordinary bears.

POGO

Walt Kelly is not only one of the greatest masters of the comic medium in the 20th century, his comic strip Pogo, alongside Krazy Kat by George Herriman, is considered one of the most sophisticated, multi-faceted and witty comics of all time. But why is it hardly known in Germany? Precisely because Pogo is so complex and intellectual, with its wealth of challenging humour, language and puns, the comic is extremely difficult to translate.

Walt Kelly, born in Philadelphia in 1913, grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Kelly was born with a talent for drawing, and in 1936, at the age of 22, he applied for a job at Disney Studios. The tough but inspiring school there paid off. Kelly was soon seconded from short-film production to feature-length films and was allowed to work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio and Fantasia (1940) as well as Dumbo (1941). He then used the great animators’ strike at Disney in 1941 as an opportunity to leave the studios. The comic book publisher Western Publishing offered him the opportunity to take responsibility for his own series Animal Comics, with funny humanised animals, but no reference to the well-known and therefore expensively licensed cartoon stars of the silver screen. Kelly excelled in the comics both as an imaginative storyteller and as a masterly illustrator. He gradually established a group of animals that all live in a swamp: first and foremost Albert the alligator and Pogo the possum, but also Howland the owl and the turtle Churchy LaFemme.

However, Walt Kelly had more ambitious (literary) plans for his characters, and he was unable to realise them in the comic book market, which was aimed more at a young audience. He had to make it into the newspapers with his comic strip, where the focus was more adult. In 1949, he succeeded: a small, liberal New York newspaper that was more on the left of the political spectrum gave Kelly's Pogo a chance. Within just two years, the one newspaper syndication had grown to over 200 US newspapers, eventually reaching 600. Pogo became the strip for a liberal, Democratic readership and enjoyed enormous popularity, particularly at colleges and in university towns.

Pogo excelled in a very broad spectrum from grandiose, exuberant screwball humour to pitch-dark political satire. While the Sunday episodes tended to avoid political issues, the weekday episodes followed American domestic and foreign policy from the 1950s to the early 1970s. They all appeared as animal figures alongside the growing cast of regulars: American presidents, governors and senators, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. Kelly was just as fearless in taking on communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon as he was in holding up a mirror to naive leftists and hippies. Pogo covered every topic: the Sputnik shock and the Cuban Missile crisis, the Cold War and Watergate. And Kelly always came to one bitter realisation: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Humans are the greatest enemy of humanity. However, it was easier to communicate this truth with the help of animals.

Walt Kelly was responsible for a comic series that takes place in a swamp. Over 100 animals live there, including an owl, a turtle, an alligator and an opossum – an animal similar to a rat that lives in America. The opossum is called Pogo and gave its name to the comic, which was printed in newspapers in the USA. It was published in English and is not so well known in Germany because the texts are full of puns and allusions which are hard to translate into German.

GARFIELD

Garfield is the most successful comic strip of all time. At the height of its success, Garfield appeared in 2,750 newspapers worldwide. Garfield thus overtook other very successful strips, relegating Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes to second and third place. In 1982, just four years after the first publication, seven of the Garfield reprint volumes were to be found on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. An unusually fast and dizzying success – all thanks to a fat lazy orange cat!

Garfield creator Jim Davis was born in 1945 on a farm in rural Indiana, in the Midwest of the USA. After studying graphic design and economics, he took a job at the studio of Tom K. Ryan, a comic artist, in 1969. Ryan encouraged Davis to create his own comic strip. After a first attempt with insects had failed miserably, Davis looked for an animal that the audience could identify with more easily. As there were already quite a few comic strip dogs, Davis decided on a cat. The first Garfield strip was published on 19 June 1978.

Essentially, Jim Davis applies all the characteristics generally associated with cats for his main character: stubborn, hard to comprehend and mostly interested in sleeping or eating. However, Davis exaggerates these characteristics to an anarchic, anti-social level. Garfield is not someone you would like to live with. He is a selfish narcissist who has no truck with people (his master Jon), companions (the dog Odie) or other creatures (spiders, birds). During the somewhat boring, hedonistic 1980s, this fell on fertile ground with audiences. Garfield was a system buster: rock 'n' roll! The Garfield strip, comprising more than 17,000 episodes to date, has made Jim Davis the richest comic artist of all time: the 80-year-old's fortune is estimated at 800 million dollars.

U.S. ACRES

In the 1980s, Jim Davis realised that there were hardly any comic strips that were suitable for younger readers. Against the backdrop of his own childhood on a farm, Davis created another comic strip set right there: U.S. Acres.

The comic strip, known in Germany as Orson's Farm, deals with the lives of a series of farm animals with human but also very eccentric characteristics. The main character is Orson, an intelligent and gentle pig. Orson tries to find ways of keeping the group of animals together and organised. This is not easy in the face of a self-enamoured rooster like Roy, who likes to play the over-correct nerd. Wade, a timid duck with a swim ring, is tormented by fears, while the two chicks, Booker and Sheldon, embody childish exuberance. And Sheldon has not even really hatched yet: only his legs are sticking out of the egg. Incidentally, it was Orson the pig who brooded them both, because the mother was not there.

Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, says: "Garfield is like a human in a cat costume." The famous cartoon cat is named after Jim's grandfather. Garfield is well known for his many bad habits and often behaves nastily – especially towards his master, Jon. He loves lasagne and hates Mondays. Many of his characteristics are very human.

Jim Davis became famous for his comic stories about Garfield – which even made him the richest comic artist in the world. But another comic was also important to him: U.S. Acres, which he intended primarily for children. He was probably thinking of his childhood on a farm. The main characters are animals such as a pig, a rooster, a chick and sheep. There are hardly any humans in the story.

DRESSING-UP CORNER

A young girl turns into a nightingale, a brother into a deer, a raven or a swan – characters in many fairy tales are transformed into animals. According to Jacob Grimm, such transformations are a reflection of the great bond between humans and animals. He emphasises the fundamental "likeness of animals to humans", the "brilliance of their eyes", and considers that they correspond to the human soul.

The fascination of transformation into an animal still holds to this day and can be seen in various different ways in society: be it the use of animal avatars in video meetings, the use of face filters in social media or the subculture of "furry fandom".

Here you have the opportunity to change into one of the famous characters from the world of fairytales and comic. Slip into an animal costume and become an animal yourself!

TRIP WITH DROP

Josephine Mark is a German comic artist and illustrator who has won numerous prizes and whose work repeatedly stands out for its depiction of animals. In 2019 came the shock when Josephine Mark was diagnosed with breast cancer. The artist then made the disease and its treatment through chemotherapy the focus of her comic Trip mit Tropf (Trip with Drop), which gained many awards.

Readers expecting a tragic treatment of the subject will be surprised – the opposite is the case: an enormously funny, sensitive but wild road trip, featuring a wolf and a rabbit. The rabbit is the cancer patient in a woodland hospital, hanging on a chemo drip. The wolf, on the other hand, is being treated for a gunshot wound at the same time. However, the hunter who fired the bullet is still hot on his heels, so he makes a hasty escape – with the rabbit in tow. A friendship slowly develops between the two unequal travelling companions, in which the animals do not completely shed their animal characteristics, but become capable of human actions and emotions: The wolf learns to drive a car and change an intravenous drip.

Both are well aware that they are contradicting their real nature, particularly the wolf, who should actually be eating the rabbit. He struggles with his surprising 'sweetness' and finds it difficult to admit to himself that he enjoys being on the road with the rabbit. The rabbit, for its part, is initially a real "scaredy-cat" and only gradually learns to assert itself, even shielding the wolf bodily from harm when necessary. In this way, the two animals change their typical characteristics as they grow closer to one another.

Josephine Mark repeatedly uses animal characters in her comic books and cartoons. Her story Trip mit Tropf (Trip with Drop) was awarded the title of "Best Comic for Children". The story tells of a rabbit and a wolf who experience adventures together. They are much more than just a "scaredy-cat" and a "ravenous wolf".

ROLY-POLY

In his graphic novel Stehaufmännchen (Roly-poly toy), Ralf König takes his characters far back into human history, some three to seven million years before our time, to the moment when the ape stood up and became a human being. While scientists are constantly coming up with new theories and having to re-label bone finds from "male" to "female" because old gender models no longer work, König casually shows that prehistoric humans were just humans. The males pat themselves on the back and make a big fuss about having awesomely overcome their animal existence by walking upright, while the females casually swing into a vertical position and ask: what's so great about that? While the males swagger about their hunts, the females are supposed to stay close to home and collect fruit. "Out of the question," say the ex-monkey girls, thumbing their noses at the ex-monkey males. Blissful prehistoric times.

In Stehaufmännchen (Roly-poly toy), Ralf König tells the story of mankind, which is many millions of years old. He talks about the prejudices of men and women, about new and old scientific concepts. And about the question: what do humans and animals have in common, and what distinguishes them from each other?

ROY AND AL

Ralf König is one of Germany's best-known comic authors and illustrators thanks to his best-selling comic book Der bewegte Mann from 1987 and its successful film adaptation (English title: The most desired man) by Sönke Wortmann (1994) with Katja Riemann and Til Schweiger. The film and comic have made a significant contribution to bringing gay life into the centre of society. Comics with gay themes are still the trademark of Ralf König, who has chosen Cologne as his home town. However, he places his clever social satires in all kinds of cultures and eras of human history – and finally, in 2004 and again in 2020, in the animal world.

Roy and Al are two (heterosexual) dogs who have to get along for better or worse because their (gay) masters have fallen in love with each other. Although they have extremely contradictory dispositions, the choleric terrier Al and the easy-going Great Dane Roy are now exposed to the vagaries of their humans' everyday lives. As the comic strictly divides the speech of the animals from that of the humans, there is plenty of room for misunderstanding. König frequently depicts Al in angry mood, thus voicing in the guise of an animal the old-school opinions of those who reject queer lifestyles. At the same time, König always offers an alternative point of view, for Roy views gay escapades with perfect calm: live and let live. Let people love whoever they want ...

Ralf König's comic is named after its two main characters: the dogs Roy and Al. The two dogs – a Great Dane and a terrier – are very different. They have to live together and get along because their two masters are a couple. The dogs watch the humans and talk about their relationship. But they never talk to the humans. The humans cannot hear or understand the animals.

FABLES

After a hundred years of entertainment culture and in an ever-growing leisure society, it is increasingly difficult to develop new content today. It would seem that every story, every punchline has been told already, every age and universe travelled. But sometimes something surprising does happen: in 2002, the American author Bill Willingham put a plot idea into practice at the American DC Comics publishing house that grew into one of the biggest comic successes of the 2000s: Fables. The main series ran until 2015, amounting to 150 issues, 110 of which were created by main illustrator Mark Buckingham.

This is what it's all about: characters known from fairy tales had to leave their home country head over heels because they were overrun in a bloody conflict by a hostile army of orcs, satyrs, forest spirits and other evil fabulous creatures. Many lost their lives in the fighting. Those who had fled were now living in diaspora in the centre of New York. The characters with a human appearance had integrated themselves into New York society as best they can, "invisibly" so to speak, with the "Woodland" apartment block in Manhattan as their administrative centre: King Cole is the mayor, Snow White ("Mrs White") head of administration, and the Big Bad Wolf ("Bigby Wolf") maintains social order as sheriff. There was a general amnesty to lay aside old animosities from the fairy tales. All the characters are suffering from the shortage of funds in the administration, they are overworked and dependent on donations from the few citizens such as Bluebeard who had managed to rescue their wealth during the escape.

However, there is an even bigger problem with the animals, the anthropomorphic fairytale characters. People should on no account realise that they can speak. That's why they have been settled on a farm far outside the city, protected by an elaborate magic spell. However, this solution gives rise to conflict, as the animals see themselves as second-class fairy-tale characters, oppressed by the royalist system of those in the town. This leads to a rebellion right at the beginning of the comic epic: shades of George Orwell's novel Animal Farm. Willingham also skilfully incorporates analogies to the French Revolution of 1789 and the communist October Revolution of 1917.

Old fairy tales, fables and legends are often used as models and sources of ideas to develop new stories set in the present day. Bill Willingham's comic series Fables tells the adventures of the big bad wolf, Snow White, Sinbad, Baba Yaga and numerous other famous characters from various fairy tale collections. Mark Buckingham draws the characters and particularly enjoys drawing the animals – whether wolves, foxes, bears, mice, squirrels or pandas.

Wolves have played a central role in our cultural history, myths and fairy tales since ancient times. They are often portrayed as dangerous, clever and cunning, which has to do with the real experience of people who had to live in the neighbourhood of wolves for centuries. Wolves preyed on their sheep, goats or chickens, and often escaped the traps devised by humans, thanks to observation, reflection, learning and developing new strategies. People who had to go through forests tried to avoid packs of wolves if possible and were reluctant to travel at night. In this way, the wolf also established itself as a metaphor for the uncanny, something lurking "somewhere out there".

From early on, a variety of texts, from Aesop to Jean de La Fontaine, evolved the image of the "wolf in sheep's clothing", i.e. the intelligent animal that skilfully disguises itself in order to conceal its malicious intentions. The myth of the werewolf, that changed from its human form into a wolf, also has an ancient origin in the legend of Lycaon. The "scientific" name of the werewolf is also goes back to this story: "lycanthrope".

The most prominent examples in popular literature are undoubtedly the wolf from the Grimm's fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood and the "big bad wolf" from the fairy tale The Three Little Pigs, which has English origins. The latter became particularly well-known thanks to the Disney short film Three Little Pigs from 1933. The Disney characters became so popular that Disney not only produced short film sequels, but also integrated the characters into its general canon, with multiple appearances in comics as well.

The most notable addition made by the comic strip was the character of "Li'l Wolf", the son of the "Big Bad Wolf", who is extremely peace-loving, seeks the friendship of the three little pigs and endeavours to stop his father from his bad ways. In 1963, it was none other than Floyd Gottfredson who produced a Christmas story in strip form: one of the rare occasions when Gottfredson deviated from his work as the main illustrator of Mickey Mouse.

We also find a wolf-like character in the superhero cosmos, Wolverine, a mutant from Marvel's X-Men group. Wolverine first appeared in a comic book in 1974 and, with his retractable claws and animalistic ability to transform, is undoubtedly a protagonist related to the werewolf, although in English the wolverine is a carnivore living mostly in the northern subarctic forests.

In fairy tales, the wolf often acts as enemy and aggressor. They are seen as dangerous and particularly uncanny, as in the old tales of the werewolf – a hybrid of man and wolf. In fairy tales, the wolf often acts as enemy and aggressor, such as in Little Red Riding Hood. It is seen as dangerous and particularly uncanny, as in the old tales of the werewolf – a hybrid of man and wolf. The evil wolf is also widespread as a Disney character, in films and comics. But comics can always do things completely differently: "Li'l Wolf", for example, short for "Little Wolf", is a comic character that is altogether friendly and peaceful.

Fascination, respect, fear: Reflections on the relationship between humans and animals

The relationships between humans and animals are complex: curiosity, disgust, personal vanity, mutual dependencies and projections all play a role. Likings and dislikings towards animals are influenced by society, culture, and the individual. Technological developments lead to changing roles for animals, for example in transport or agriculture. Animal rights movements and initiatives against speciesism campaign for a different treatment of animals. Various perspectives and positions on these topics are presented in this video installation: Social, moral and practical aspects of coexistence – in the form of a collage and a selection of individual interviews with different focuses, for example with experts from biology, narrative research and art.

Encounters with animals trigger different feelings and thoughts. How do you react – with curiosity, caution or routine? How do you communicate with animals? In the interviews shown here, different people tell of their experiences and opinions on this topic.