From the Big Bad Wolf to Donald Duck - Animals in Comics
Special Exhibition
Whether in the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales or in contemporary comics – animals play essential roles. They appear as heroes or antiheroes, opponents or allies, loyal companions or enchanted humans. Often, they serve as projections of human traits, emotions, desires, fears, and values. Stories with anthropomorphic animals invite us to reflect on the real-life, everyday relationship between humans and animals.
Comics, as a highly popular medium, offer especially vivid portrayals and have made anthropomorphic animal characters into stars. Original drawings, sketches, studies, and merchandise – curated by art historian and comic expert Dr. Alexander Braun – provide insights into the humor, artistry, and history of comics up to the present day.
Animals have shaped the stories of comics in distinctive and profound ways – whether it’s the unlucky Donald Duck, the lazy and gluttonous Garfield, or the Wolf from Fables, inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales. 19th-century picture sheets, considered precursors to comics, feature animals as fairy tale heroes, role models, or even clichés.
The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on common stereotypes, explore different perspectives on human-animal relationships, encounter a variety of comic animal characters, create their own comics, and even transform themselves into animals.
Children receive a free activity booklet, the Puzzle Trail, encouraging creative engagement with the comic world, from Donald Duck to Garfield and fantastical animal characters.
Curated by Dr. Alexander Braun.
A comprehensive catalogue will be published alongside the exhibition.
The exhibition is generously sponsored by the City of Kassel (documenta city) and the Hessian Cultural Foundation.
Dr. Alexander Braun
Born in Dortmund in 1966, Dr. Alexander Braun earned his PhD in art history in 1995 with a dissertation on American installation artist Robert Gober. His career as a visual artist included exhibitions in Germany, Austria, the UK, Spain, and the US. He has received prestigious grants and awards, including the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2011), the Bonn Art Prize (2009), and an artist residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (1999).
Since 2008, Braun has focused increasingly on curating exhibitions about comics in museums. In 2010, he founded the German Academy of Comic Art. So far, he has curated 24 museum exhibitions on the subject, including Pioneers of the Comic (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2016) and Comics! Mangas! Graphic Novels! (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2017).
More than 20 extensive publications on the history of comics have been released. In 2015 and 2020, Alexander Braun became the only German to receive an “Eisner Award” in the USA — the “Oscar” of the comic world — for his trilingual volumes on the work of Winsor McCay and George Herriman (published by Taschen Verlag). Braun has also been awarded the Munich-based “Peng” Prize four times so far. In 2022, his scholarly achievements were honored with a Max and Moritz Prize in Erlangen.
Since its founding in 2019, Braun has primarily dedicated himself to the “schauraum: comic + cartoon” in Dortmund, where he has curated eight exhibitions to date — most recently the highly successful show “The Simpsons – It Doesn’t Get Any More Yellow.” Alexander Braun lives in Bad Honnef near Bonn.
Alexej Tchernyi
© Foto: Norbert Miguletz
"It’s astonishing how little literary or art history has dealt with the motif of the anthropomorphic animal in comics. A whole tradition, from Goethe to Jean de La Fontaine and all the way back to Aesop in antiquity, is familiar with the fable as a literary form or folk tale. Comics of the 20th and 21st centuries represent its essence — a gigantic final fireworks display.”
Learn more with our events and public guided tours (in German) around the special exhibition:
