Strizz

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Strizz is a comic strip series drawn by Volker Reiche for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) , the main character of which also bears the same name. It appeared from May 2002 to December 2010. Since mid-March 2015, the series has been continued again.

Appear

After a long conception phase, the first strip appeared on May 21, 2002 on the last page of the feature pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

From then on, Strizz appeared as a two-line comic strip from Monday to Friday for six years. In January 2008, older episodes (from 2003) were repeated for the first time because of an illness by Volker Reich. Strizz was also the first comic strip that made it into a four-color full page in a national German daily newspaper: on New Year's Eve 2003 . Since then, a colored long episode has appeared in other New Year's Eve issues of the FAZ.

On Friday, January 2, 2009, the strip appeared for the last time in a weekday edition of the FAZ. On the following day, it was switched to a weekly publication frequency and since then has had its place in the Saturday feature section Pictures and Times , where it has half a page Space was available instead of - as before - a quarter page. The last episode appeared on Friday, December 31, 2010. In 2015, Volker Reiche and the FAZ revived the series. Since March 16, 2015, an episode has been published every Monday under the title Strizz unlimited .

Strizz has been appearing in Frankfurter Allgemeine Woche since September 21, 2018 .

History of origin

The FAZ had already tried to establish a regular comic strip since 2001 with a series by Steven Appleby , which, however, only met with little response from readers. Reiche then applied to the features section and in early 2002 was commissioned to develop a concept. After a four-month planning phase, he was then awarded the contract.

Reiche planned a strip that would take place in today's Germany, with a solid base of characters who comment on current events from their point of view. Reiche originally considered Neustadt as the title , which would have placed a location of the same name in the foreground and would not have privileged any protagonist among the large group of actors. Then he still decided on a hero named "Strizz". Since Reiche planned an accompanying website right from the start, he came up with an artificial name in order to be able to register a short, memorable .de domain. He googled the invented word “Strizz” in the concept phase, there wasn't a single entry for it on the web, so the registration went smoothly. It was only later that he realized that when choosing a name he might have had the name of a friend, Klaus Strzyz, in the back of his mind, who pronounced himself exactly like "Strizz". At Wolfgang "Wolle" Strzyz Rich was thinking according to his information second. The scene of the event, on the other hand, initially remained nameless, even if the use of certain street names (e.g. Friedrichstrasse, Grüneburgweg) always suggested that it was the FAZ's hometown. Only in December 2006, in a conversation between Tassilo and Mr. Paul, the name Frankfurt was explicitly mentioned .

particularities

The consequences arise every day; Reiche says he is not able to draw Strizz in advance.

A peculiarity that the series shares with very few others - such as Eva in the Tages-Anzeiger , Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury or Walt Kelly's Pogo - is its current political relevance, which is only possible due to its near-publication development. Allusions to real world events that are dealt with outside of the strip in the newspaper are characteristic of Strizz . The diversity of the figure types enables a politically pluralistic glossing of world events; Ultimately, of course, that basic tone of bourgeois conservatism dominates, which generally characterizes the FAZ feature pages.

Another peculiarity arises from this constant reference to the course of world events: The untold time “between the individual episodes” is not static. Although the characters are - as is typical of the genre - not exposed to physical aging, they nevertheless go through processes of experience that sustainably enrich their characters and add new properties; occasionally characters also explicitly refer to experiences from episodes that were weeks or years ago.

Reiche has been offering a very rare specialty in the strip genre since autumn 2005: He let Irmi, Strizz's wife, become pregnant; on the day of the 2006 World Cup final, she gave birth to twins. With this, Reiche finally introduced the factor of personal lifetime and thus an aging process of - at least individual - characters in his ongoing narrative. The question of whether the birth would remain the last life chronological act for the babies was clarified a good year after their birth: Instead of just being able to imitate the last syllable of the words just spoken, as in the months before, the babies were now in Able to articulate words that were not spoken beforehand (at the sight of dinosaurs who had not been named by anyone else, one of the babies said "Ino" on his own). On February 12, 2008, one of the twins was also seen walking upright for the first time.

Rafael began the aging process in the fall of 2008: "Since I have grown clearly, my sense of embarrassment has grown enormously," he explicitly addresses this on October 31, 2008. In fact, his body is now proportioned differently than at the beginning of the series: While Rafael's head initially took up half of his body height in accordance with the child-like scheme, it now only makes up a third.

In the course of the first episodes, the basic cast that is still valid today was created, but Reiche continues to add new characters to it. He has immortalized his friends from the comic scene in some of their names: Archivist Berres, for example, is named after the illustrator and ICOM documentarist Werner P. Berres . Strizz's wife Irmi is named after Volker Reiches own wife, while Mr. Leo's secretary, Mrs. Gerhardt, is named after the Donaldist Martina Gerhardt. Leonie is modeled on a 7-year-old girl who complained in a letter to the editor that there were too few female characters in the series. FAZ editor Andreas Platthaus made a guest appearance as the stingy "Banker Platthans", his colleague Patrick Bahners figured in the summer of 2008 as the hamster "Patrick", who was noticed in a discussion among animals through detailed constitutional philosophical considerations, as is often found in Bahners' articles Find.

Characters

  • Strizz , a thinking but not always diligent accountant who tries to make a living at work;
  • Irmi , his painter wife (wedding was on April 28, 2006), who embodies common sense towards him, so to speak;
  • Leo , the fatherly boss of Leo & Co. , who endures all the capers of Strizz with stoic composure - despite some outbursts -;
  • Rafael , Strizz's nephew, philosophical boob and director of a chocolate museum, and the rest of his philosophical sextet:
  • Krock , the grim crocodile;
  • Dino , the smart dinosaur;
  • Leonie , the somewhat flirtatious giraffe;
  • Driver , the agile driver;
  • Mr. Teddy , the sad looking bear;
  • Quieki , the piggy bank, who also takes on various roles in Rafael's theater performances, but is not part of the philosophical sextet;

to

  • Irmi's mother Paula , also called Omi, a woman with a lot of life experience;
  • Gabriele , her chain-smoking friend;
  • Paula and Vincent , the twins of Strizz and Irmi, born on July 9, 2006, the day of the World Cup final;
  • Mr. Berres , the misanthropic archivist from Leo & Co. , who lives with the rats Lilo and Bernd in the basement or in a paper trash container or a caravan in the company yard;
  • Clara , one of Rafael's often bold playmates ;

finally:

  • Mr. Paul , Leo's cat with ambition for dictatorship, who always starts with every argument, especially with his intimate enemy, Wolle vom Grüneburgweg;
  • Tassilo , the haiku poetic farm dog;
  • Müller , Irmi's altruistic dachshund
  • Ms. Gerhardt , Mr. Leo's chief secretary, appears for the first time in October 2004. She uses a voice recognition system to operate her computer and worships her boss, for whom she knits sweaters.
  • Inga , Mrs. Gerhardt's white cat, came into play in September 2006. She has won over her conspecific Mr. Paul, but is (sometimes) also adored by wool.
  • Wool , uneducated tomcat from a humble background, friend of Müller and Tassilo, but declared archenemy of Mr. Paul
  • the young male cats of Grüneburgweg (also declared arch enemies of Mr. Paul)
  • the bird Teresa and other still nameless birds

Book publications

The first four volumes were published by CH Beck (Beck'sche series), the following by the FAZ Institute:

Also:

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Reiche. Retrieved April 15, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Rhein-Main.Net »Lifestyle» Current reports »« FAZ »-Comic figure St… . March 9, 2004. Archived from the original on October 1, 2015.
  3. ↑ Market Economy Foundation »Award ceremony 2008 . 2008. Archived from the original on January 26, 2012.