Rudolph Dirks

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Panel by Rudolph Dirks from the comic The Katzenjammer Kids , 1901

Rudolph Dirks (born February 26, 1877 in Heide , German Reich , † April 20, 1968 in New York ) was a German-American comic pioneer . With The Katzenjammer Kids he invented one of the first and oldest still published comic strips in the world.

Since 2016, the German Comic Con in Dortmund has been awarding the Rudolph Dirks Award for graphic literature in his honor , which was created as the European counterpart to the US comic awards Eisner Award and Harvey Award .

Life

Dirks moved with his family to Chicago in 1884 , where his first cartoons were published in 1897. When he was drawing for Randolph Hearst's Journal American , he was supposed to design a strip for the magazine that could compete with the Yellow Kid in Joseph Pulitzer's publications. Allegedly, this strip was supposed to be designed based on the picture story Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch .

Dirks is not only one of the first pioneers of the comic strip, but also introduced dialogue within a panel and continuity between different panels in the form of speech bubbles . Dirks also went down in legal history because, after 15 years of drawing comics, he fought for certain rights to comics for Hearst. Ultimately, Hearst retained the rights to the name, but Dirks retained the rights to the characters, who from then on initially appeared under the names Hans and Fritz .

In 2019, director Martina Fluck devoted herself to the life story of Rudolph Dirks and that of his brother Gus, who died early and was also a comic artist, in her film Katzenjammer Kauderwelsch .

Publications

  • Rudolph Dirks: The Katzenjammer Kids. Dover Publications, New York 1974, ISBN 0-486-23005-8 (1908 reissue)

literature

  • Tim Eckhorst: Rudolph Dirks: Katzenjammer, kids & gibberish. Deich Verlag, Wewelsfleth 2012, ISBN 978-3-942074-05-6 .
  • Museumsinsel Lüttenheid, Benedikt Brebeck (Ed.): Rudolph Dirks. Two rascals and the invention of modern comics , exhibition catalog, Heide 2018, ISBN 978-3-96234-004-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RUDOLPH DIRKS AWARD - The international comic prize of the German Comic Con - Comic.de. Retrieved June 25, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Dirks, Rudolph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American comic book pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Heide (Holstein) , Dithmarschen
DATE OF DEATH April 20, 1968
Place of death New York City