Adam and Eve

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Adam und Evchen is a series of comic strips by the German illustrator and humorist Loriot , which appeared in 29 episodes in the illustrated magazine Quick in1956. The content was the married life of a young couple. The series differed significantly from Loriot's other drawing style, which can be attributed to the influence of the Quick editorial team. In contrast to many of Loriot's other drawings, it never appeared in book form and has largely been forgotten.

Content and drawing style

The content of the series is the life of the young married couple Adam and Evchen. As many readers as possible should recognize themselves in it, which is already clear from the choice of names and the reference to the biblical couple Adam and Eve . The introductory text of the first episode also describes this:

“Our illustrator picked two people out of 50 million Germans (our picture shows only a part) ... Adam and Evchen, a married couple whose strange experiences you can follow here. It is completely impossible for other married couples to experience the same thing ... "

Next to it is a picture of a square with a large crowd. A small section showing the faces of Adam and Eve is shown enlarged.

The drawings in the series are designed as comic strips. This style had Loriot already in 1954 and 1955 in the world published series family Liebsam used and attacked him again from 1963 to 1964 for the Quick series Poppe and Co back. In addition , the comic strip Reinhold das Nashorn , for which Loriot provided the drawings, appeared in Sternchen , the children's supplement to the Stern , between 1953 and 1969 .

The two protagonists Adam and Evchen differ significantly in their appearance from the male bulbous nose that Loriot was already using in drawings at this time and that became his trademark. Adam usually wears a black cutaway and striped pants, but his head is bigger and rounder. His nose is much smaller, his thinning hair, in contrast to the side part of the bulbous-nosed male, has been combed straight back and thus follows the fashion of the time. While for the Germanist Stefan Neumann, who wrote his dissertation on Loriot's work, the facial expression of the bulbous-nosed man, with his receding forehead and tapering mouth, usually lies between struggles for composure and a touch of stupidity or horror, Adam affects him through his small, downward-drawn mouth, mostly melancholy. Evchen's appearance differs even more clearly and is an absolute exception in Loriot's graphic work. Compared to the bulbous nose woman, her recognizable breasts, a narrow waist and accentuated buttocks appear much more feminine. This continues in the long black hair and her face with the very small nose and drawn lips. From Neumann's point of view, she is more like a figure by Manfred Schmidt , who also drew for Quick . Her facial expression is usually even more melancholy than that of her husband. Overall, both figures look much younger than the common pair of bulbous noses from Loriot.

This youthfulness is usually not reflected in the content of the individual episodes, which could also be shown with the ageless pair of bulbous noses. The sixth episode is an exception. In it, the couple can initially be seen in a night bar. Adam closely follows the performance of a scantily clad woman. In the two following pictures you can see Evchen bringing a soup tureen to the dining table at home, wearing the same lingerie as the woman in the night bar. Adam only looks up briefly and then turns back to his newspaper, to which Evchen reacts with a downcast and disappointed look. It is more often the case that Evchen as a victim does not seem funny, but rather pitiful, as in this episode. According to Stefan Neumann, comedy mainly arises in episodes that play with the interplay of gender roles or in which the couple work together against others.

It is noticeable that, apart from the introduction of the first episode and sub-texts in episodes 5 and 6, the series completely dispenses with the use of text.

Creation and publication

Loriot was permanently employed by Th. Martens & Co. since May 1954 . His work initially focused on the magazine Weltbild , for which he drew the True Stories from April 1955, for example . In the illustrated magazine Quick of the same publisher in 1954 and 1955, only four backsides designed by Loriot and one individual drawing appeared. The series Adam and Evchen , which appeared weekly in 29 episodes between January 14 and July 28, 1956, represented a kind of debut for the illustrator in this magazine. The special style of the drawings, which deviated from everything that Loriot had had drawn up until then, and was never taken up again later, went back to employees of Quick . In an interview with Robert Gernhardt , which appeared in Stern in 1993 , Loriot reports that he once had an editor blackmail him into drawing more amiable faces. He later confirmed to Stefan Neumann that this comment referred to Adam and Evchen .

The series began a gradual development in which Loriot shifted the focus of his work to the Quick , which, in contrast to the biweekly published Weltbild, appeared every week and was much more widely distributed. His last work in the Weltbild appeared in 1959; he worked for Quick until the end of 1970.

Unlike many other drawings by Loriot that initially appeared in magazines, such as the star series Auf den Hund haben , Adam und Evchen was never published as a book. The series was also not included in compilations or exhibition catalogs. This also applies to the Liebsam family . Only individual drawings from the Poppe and Co series were published in anthologies without reference to the series. This makes Reinhold the rhino the only one of Loriot's four comic strips that was published as a book.

rating

Stefan Neumann sees Adam and Evchen as a step backwards in the development of Loriot's work and counts them among his less successful works. In addition to the style of drawing, which deviates from the rest of Loriot's work, he sees the lack of text as a negative. At that time Loriot had already discovered the contrast between text and image as a means of generating comedy, which later characterized his graphic work, but also became part of his television and operatic work. Neumann positively emphasizes that Loriot succeeds more than once in the series in depicting the comedy of the pitfalls of everyday family life , which he had not achieved before in the Liebsam family series . This theme later developed into a main content of Loriot's humorous work, for example in his poem Advent , the cartoon sketches Das Frühstücksei and Feierabend as well as his two feature films Ödipussi and Pappa ante portas .

Loriot himself does n't seem to have been satisfied with Adam and Eve either. In the above-mentioned interview with Robert Gernhardt, for example, he said that responding to the suggestions of the Quick editorial team "went completely wrong". In addition, for Neumann, the complete renunciation of the publication of drawings in books is an indication of Loriot's negative view of the series.

literature

  • Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the comedy. Life, work and work of Vicco von Bülow . Scientific publishing house Trier, Trier 2011, ISBN 978-3-86821-298-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 156.
  2. ↑ Quick . No. 2 , January 14, 1956, p. 18 . Quoted in: Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 156.
  3. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 116.
  4. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 103.
  5. ↑ a b Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 157.
  6. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 160-161.
  7. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 158, 160.
  8. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 35.
  9. ↑ a b Robert Gernhardt: A gentleman with a deep meaning. Interview with Loriot . In: Stern . No. 45 , November 4, 1993, pp. 50–60, here: 50–51 . Quoted in: Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 158.
  10. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 158.
  11. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 137.
  12. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 40.
  13. ↑ a b Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 163.
  14. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 122.
  15. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 199.
  16. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 33.
  17. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 157, 163.
  18. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 157–158.
  19. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 158, 357.
  20. ^ Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 159.
  21. ^ Felix Christian Reuter: Chaos, comedy, cooperation. Loriot's television sketches (=  Oliver Jahraus , Stefan Neuhaus [Hrsg.]: FILM - MEDIA - DISCOURSE . Volume 70 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-8260-5898-1 , p. 121-122 .