The Adventures of Phoebe Time Spirit

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The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist (English The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist ) is an American comic strip that was written by Michael O'Donoghue and drawn by Frank Springer .

action

Phoebe Zeit-Geist, an aristocratic girl of Serbian origin who was raised in northern Tibet, is drugged and kidnapped at a garden party in Antwerp and suffers various sadistic assaults, ranging from forced striptease to sodomy . Travel through space and time allowed the comic's creators to address current issues such as the Vietnam War and racial discrimination in the United States. In the magazine publication the strip ends with the death of the protagonist, while in the later album publication - after evaluating a reader survey - she escapes her tormentors and ends up at another Antwerp garden party.

publication

The Adventures of Phoebe-time spirit appeared in the years 1965 and 1966 in the magazine Evergreen Review the publisher Grove Press , and then also as an album. In German-speaking countries, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist was first published in 1970 by Konkret Buchverlag . The Melzer Verlag published in 1973 in the series Brumm Comix a shortened reprint of this edition. The first French translations were available as early as the late 1960s.

censorship

A year after Jean-Claude Forests Barbarella was published in the same magazine, the publication of explicitly pornographic representations under the label of satire in a free-sale magazine in the United States was a novelty and a further weakening of the Comics Code . The Federal Inspectorate for Writings Harmful to Young Persons put The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist on the list of writings harmful to minors with its publication in the Federal Gazette on March 16, 1974. This indexing lasted until a change in the law in 2002. As early as 1965, the German distributor had approached the then head of the Federal Testing Office for writings harmful to minors and asked him for his opinion. His written reply, in which he expressed his horror at the copy presented to him, was forwarded by the distributor to the publisher and published by him. The head of the Federal Testing Office for writings harmful to minors had considered Phoebe Zeit-Geist to be “suitable” for “endangering international understanding based on NATO” because of a Nazi who appeared at a US air force base in the post-war period . This was exploited through an advertisement in the New York Times .

reception

In 1967, Fritz J. Raddatz wrote in Die Zeit that “the new heroines of the western world”, to whom he counted alongside Phoebe Zeit-Geist and Barbarella , were “servants of a fashionable snob appeal” who “served the illiterate reading people [...] should". A year earlier, Der Spiegel had described The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist as "pornographic-sadistic". Roland Seim rated the indexing of The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, carried out in 1974, in comparison to the indexing of Anne and Hans as "more understandable", since the comic presupposes "a considerable degree of reflection on the part of the viewer".

In his play, Blood on the Cat's Neck, Rainer Werner Fassbinder named a central figure “Phoebe Zeitgeist”.

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Andreas C. Knigge : Sex in comics . Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-548-36518-3 , pp. 199 .
  2. ^ Franco Fossati: The large illustrated Ehapa comic lexicon . Ehapa, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-7704-0865-9 , pp. 202 .
  3. Andreas C. Knigge : Sex in comics . Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-548-36518-3 , pp. 263 .
  4. The adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist at Konkret Buchverlag on comicguide.de, accessed March 23, 2009
  5. a b c The adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist at Melzer Verlag on comicguide.de, accessed March 23, 2009
  6. Frank Springer at lambiek.net (English), accessed March 23, 2009
  7. Andreas C. Knigge : Sex in comics . Ullstein, Frankfurt / Berlin / Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-548-36518-3 , pp. 242 .
  8. a b c d e Sieg Heil . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 1966 ( online ).
  9. Fritz J. Raddatz : The new heroines of the western world . In: The time . No. 11, March 17, 1967
  10. Roland Seim: “No Sex, please!” - Comic and censorship (PDF; 65 kB) on telos-verlag.de, accessed May 29, 2009