Jimmy the rubber horse
Jimmy the rubber horse , a white, living rubber animal with a valve in its tail through which it can be inflated, and his rider Julio , a plump gaucho , are comic characters by the cartoonist Roland Kohlsaat (1913–1978) and “probably the most bizarre team of German heroes Comic history ”( Andreas C. Knigge ).
Her fantastic adventures, which were very successful with readers, have been published weekly since June 28, 1953 - initially under the series title Julio and Jimmy , then after about nine months as Jimmy the rubber horse - weekly in Sternchen , the children's supplement to the magazine stern . When Das Sternchen was discontinued as a separate magazine supplement in 1961 and turned into a double page in stern , the comic series continued in this context until the beginning of 1977 with Kohlsaat as the only draftsman and author. In August 1970, the series was renamed Julio's Adventurous Journeys .
The beginning
In mid-1953, the German magazine stern launched a children's supplement in the form of an enclosed multi-page booklet entitled Das Sternchen (advertising slogan: “Children love little stars - Sternchen is the star child”). Editor-in-chief Henri Nannen was looking for illustrators who could contribute content and also turned to the Hamburg-based illustrator and copywriter Roland Kohlsaat, who has worked for various German magazines since 1948 and has already done a graphic implementation of Erich Kästner's Emil and the detectives for the Funkwacht magazine had gathered his first comic book experience. Kohlsaat was trained as a lithographer, painter and sculptor at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts and after the Second World War, in order not to starve to death, he hired himself as a “girl for everything” on an estate near Gifhorn. There he worked extensively with horses, which prompted him to earn a not inconsiderable extra income as a painter of horse pictures. (More artists and authors who later for employees in asterisk were acquired were about Loriot with Reinhold the rhinoceros , Hans Jürgen Press with the little ones Mr. Jacob and the adventures of the "black hand" and FW Richter-Johnsen and Fritz Raab with Taró .)
After his acceptance to the stern , Kohlsaat was faced with the task of developing a viable idea within a short time that promised enough material for a long-running comic series, and so he fell back on what he had achieved some practice in in recent years and which he also clearly enjoyed: the representation of horses. Practically overnight he invented the Mexican gaucho Julio and his wonder horse Jimmy, who - after having become good friends through shared adventures - were soon to form a perfectly coordinated team. As he later explained, Kohlsaat was inspired for his characters by, among other things, José Luis Salinas ' Cisco Kid . In the first panel of the first Jimmy episode, which appeared in Sternchen No. 3 in 1953, Julio bought the rubber horse in the pampas from a hawker, who praised it with the following words: “A rubber mule, senor. It's the latest from the USA - runs, jumps and does whatever you want. "Then Julio:" Has bought it. "
Mixture of physics and fairy tales
In the first episode, Kohlsaat tests what can be started with the fairytale figure of a living horse that is made of air and rubber: Jimmy gallops against an upright wooden plank, bounces back with the rider like a ball, flies backwards in a large arc the air and ends up with his butt in the pitchfork of a passing farmer, whereupon a leak develops in his rubber cover that Julio has to mend. In another early episode, Julio has Jimmy washed and pumped up at a gas station, whereupon the gas station attendant overflows Jimmy to the point of bursting and unintentionally lifts him off the ground.
Jimmy is a child's dream come true of a toy that comes to life (which explains a little of the long-lasting success with small and big readers alike). The faithful rubber horse stands by its owner like a good spirit in all situations, but requires care and constant attention. When the rubber horse is inflated to horse size - usually with Julio's breath - Jimmy behaves as one would expect a horse to do: it gallops, jumps, crouches, turns its head and so on - although it cannot dive because it does like an inflated lifebuoy is made almost entirely of air. Jimmy is mute (you never see it neigh or snort) and it doesn't have to eat anything; his facial expressions mostly express equanimity, sometimes a good mood. Julio can simply deflate Jimmy and wrap his limp shell around his hips like a belt, if the surroundings become tight or sharp-edged; so Jimmy can also be carried underwater. If Jimmy's inflated rubber shell body is heated, the horse begins to rise up into the air like a balloon with any loads it can carry. In some episodes, Julio uses Jimmy's valve as a nozzle by simply opening it, with the outflowing air turning horse and rider into a flying missile, or he sticks a burning firework into Jimmy's stubby tail, which has the same effect. Kohlsaat often makes use in his stories of the fact that Jimmy can withstand falls from great heights unscathed when inflated; its elasticity and air supply are useful in many situations. The draftsman lets Julio use his Jimmy as a (whiskey-powered) propeller plane, as a parachute or as a door opener; once the gaucho even spends the night on the high seas in Jimmy's belly, through whose mouth he got on there.
Julio is the optimistic, intrepid hero with a strong sense of justice who likes to drink whiskey and - when astonished or angry - calls out “Caramba!”, “Santos!” Or “Sapristi!”; he has an inexhaustible supply of lists and ideas and treats women as a real "Caballero" (Spanish for rider, figuratively knight, cavalier) with exquisite courtesy.
For almost twenty-five years horse and rider formed a symbiotic pair of friends who went through thick and thin together. Without Jimmy, Julio would often have been lost in tricky situations, and without Julio's clever ideas Jimmy would not have been able to show what he was made of.
Adventure all over the world
After Kohlsaat had been telling stories for almost three years from mid-1953 onwards that comprised only one star page with four panel strips and played mainly in the homeland of both heroes - the Argentine pampas - on February 25, 1956, a long and seamless sequel began temporary adventures that ended more than twenty years later with the discontinuation of the series in the star . Horse and rider now preferred to find themselves in unexplored corners of the earth, which were far removed from all known civilizations (and far removed from the real Federal Republic of the 1950s and 1960s). The earth was a timeless and placeless cosmos of lonely and mysterious landscapes, in which set pieces from the cultural history of all corners of the world and times appeared: oriental stories , German fairy tales, legends of ancient Greece , Indian and Egyptian motifs, but also topoi of trivialities - and adventure literature of the 19th and 20th centuries were used. Kohlseat mixed this with various science fiction elements, his own inventions of bizarre beings, plants and buildings as well as subtle echoes of Jonathan Swift's satirical travelogues or the adventures of Baron Münchhausen ; In summary, the illustrator once called his comic a modern “pop odyssey ”.
The character of the rubber horse, which is so peculiarly composed of comprehensible physics and fairytale-like, fantastic properties, is continued in many narrative details of the adventures that the team experienced in the “endless” saga from February 1956. Julios Sombrero, for example, can create turbulences in the air during a fall from the sky, which grow into tights and pull the wearer of the sombrero back up with their suction. A meteorite that has fallen to earth has the ability to cancel gravity in the moonlight. Beings trapped in amber or ice for decades are "thawed" and begin to live again. Once can Kohlsaat a real oriental genie in Jimmy's body live, other times floats there an ancient Egyptian wonders stone. The two friends hang around in extinct volcanoes, in different jungles, swamp areas and mountains, on all oceans, in the air, in sunken Atlantis and in extensive cave systems. You get to islands where the whole flora and fauna are huge due to unexplained forces. You can see them several times in abandoned cities and hidden temples, the builders of which have been forgotten. The heroes encounter silted up robots , angry giants, mole people with grotesque noses, centaurs and amazons , friendly mermaids and nereids , Aztec sun priests, short-sighted "stalked eyes" (big eyes that grow on stems from a rock face) and English-speaking dinosaurs . Their opponents include murderous vultures, sea snakes, modern pirates equipped with electronics and jungle bandits . Julio and the unsinkable Jimmy are often on the move on subterranean and above-ground waters, where they discover previously unknown islands and their strange inhabitants; once they even visit a strange planet with the help of a robot-controlled spaceship.
particularities
Kohlseat drew, washed and colored Jimmy the rubber horse , while the strip was being published in Sternchen , entirely himself. He also invented all the stories and wrote them alone - the editors of the star simply pasted over Kohlsaat's handwritten texts in the text boxes and speech bubbles with machine-set font before printing but without changing the wording. Kohlsaat's color scheme was idiosyncratic: because the star only allowed him one other printing color besides black, he only used black and red ink, but watercolored or thinned both colors as required in order to achieve differentiated gray values, transitions or skin tones - something for that time Comics almost unique process.
The peculiar color mood of black and red watercolors today contributes to the special flair of Jimmy the rubber horse in addition to the extraordinary staff and the often strange adventures that the two heroes experience . In stern , however, the series could not be seen in Kohlsaat's original colors for the entire duration of its term - at times gray areas were replaced by green; in later years the strip was only printed in black and white or in shades of gray. As a result of the restructuring and cuts in the asterisk , the number of panel strips that were available per week for cabbage seeds was reduced from four to three, and shortly afterwards to two strips. This two-striped appearance with typically three panels per strip, which were also more scaled down and poorly reproduced than at the time when Jimmy the Gumipferd still appeared in the separate leaflet , was finally retained until the strip was discontinued.
Reprints and attempts to continue
After Kohlsaat died on February 1, 1978 at the age of 65, Edition Becker & Knigge began in 1979 to reissue the old adventures in album form, beginning with the start of the "endless" sequel story. However, this edition was discontinued in 1981 after the publication of the third volume; all Jimmy episodes from February 1956 to the turn of the year 1958–1959 are contained in the original coloring in the three volumes . Four new stories, which were not drawn and written by Kohlsaat but by Fred Kipka and which were created in the COMICON studios in Barcelona , appeared in 1983 and 1984 as sequels in the comic magazine Yps , in issues 422–428, 433– 439, 443-449 and 456-462. In 2003, and thus on the 50th anniversary of the start of series production, the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum Hannover organized an exhibition (later in the Altonaer Museum in Hamburg), which included around 300 original Jimmy pages from the Kohlsaat family's possession as well as some accompanying material such as asterisks - Presented copies and other contemporary documents. At the same time as this exhibition, a large-format catalog was published by Lappan Verlag in Oldenburg, containing the (almost) complete adventures from 1959 to 1963, reproduced from the original drawings.
- Jimmy the rubber horse. By R. Kohlsaat . Sternchen book no.3 published by Blüchert Verlag, Stuttgart 1954 (contains a selection of 17 one-page stories from 1953 and 1954)
- Roland Kohlsaat: Julios adventurous journeys Volume 1 - In the realm of the birds of death . Edition Becker & Knigge, Hannover 1979, ISBN 3-88464-004-6
- Roland Kohlsaat: Julio's adventurous journeys Volume 2 - The diamond of the Sphinx . Edition Becker & Knigge, Hannover 1980, ISBN 3-88464-016-X
- Roland Kohlsaat: Julio's adventurous journeys Volume 3 - The ghost ship . Edition Becker & Knigge, Hannover 1981, ISBN 3-88464-018-6
- Roland Kohlsaat: Jimmy the rubber horse. The adventures of Julio and Jimmy . Edited and with a foreword by Hans Joachim Neyer. Lappan Verlag, Oldenburg 2003, ISBN 3-8303-3065-0