Volker Reiche

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Volker Reiche (2014)

Volker Reiche (born May 31, 1944 in Belzig , Brandenburg ) is a German comic artist . He has been drawing the comic strip Strizz for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 2002 . Before that, he worked for Disney for years as an illustrator of Donald Duck stories. At times he also drew the strip Mecki in the Hörzu . He is the brother of Dietlof Reiche .

life and work

As a refugee family, the Reiches first moved to Franconia after the Second World War , then to Königstein im Taunus , where Reiche still lives today.

The German Mickey Mouse magazines, in particular the Donald stories by Carl Barks , and later the underground comics by Robert Crumb , became the first formative graphic influences for rich people . Reiche began his comic career as an underground illustrator, in whose works “free love” and political protest played a major role. He drew, among others, for the magazines Pardon and Titanic .

In 1976, Reich's first own volume, “Liebe”, appeared. In 1979 the second, expanded edition was sold. The volume was promptly indexed because of its sexually revealing content . Reiche tried - in the opinion of most critics successfully - to combine the narrative technique of Barks with the expressive gesture of Crumb.

Volker Reiche signing (2014)

From 1979 Reiche drew six Donald Duck stories for the Dutch Oberon publishing house. After he had a story of Reiches redrawn by another draftsman, Reiche broke off his work for the publisher. From 1993 to 2002 the stories were first published in Germany.

In the early 1980s, Rich then again turned to Disney and made pencil sketches for commercials in which the respective cover of Mickey Mouse -Hefte or the Merry paperback book into short animated films transpose.

In 1984, Semmel-Verlach , which also published the series of albums “ Werner ”, released a first volume by “Willi Wiedehopf”, which Reiche wanted to expand into a series. However, an announced second volume no longer appeared.

From 1985 to 2006 Reiche drew the strip "Mecki" in the magazine Hörzu , which according to his own statements was enough to relieve him of financial worries. So he was able to concentrate mainly on painting in the 1990s.

Since May 2002 he has been drawing the weekday comic strip Strizz for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . He named Charles M. Schulz (" The Peanuts "), Walt Kelly (" Pogo ") and Bill Watterson (" Calvin & Hobbes ") as role models . After six and a half years, Reiche stopped his weekday comics at the end of 2008 and only drew for the FAZ on Saturdays. The last episode appeared on December 31, 2010. Strizz has been published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Woche since 2018 .

In these picture stories, which he tells with a long breath, which some call almost "epic", he constructs a complex fictional world that appears immediately real and lively through the figures populating it and their wealth of detail, whereby he explains the difficulty in brief to accommodate weekly continuable sequences and to make each one appear self-contained with a punchline, seemingly effortlessly mastered.

Otherwise, actors in this genre appear in his comics with well-known extraordinary qualities: talking animals, children with amazing intellectual abilities that enable them to hold philosophical seminars and employees who are not dismissed despite the greatest laziness.

Reiche also works as a painter , using the styles and modes of representation of great models such as Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, Picasso or Monet, exaggerating these into the grotesque by quoting his comic characters. The Olaf Gulbransson Museum for Graphics and Caricature at Tegernsee is showing examples of his work as a painter in a retrospective in August 2009.

Volker Reiche is a two-time winner of the Max and Moritz Prize awarded at the Erlangen International Comic Salon and an honorary member of DONALD In 2007 he received the Olaf Gulbransson Prize .

In autumn 2013, Reiche's drawn autobiography was published as a graphic novel Kiesgrubennacht by Berlin's Suhrkamp Verlag. In mid-February 2014, the FAZ reported that a new comic strip called Snirks Café had been published for five months on the final page of the printed FAZ feature pages and on FAZ.net.

Quotes

“His Strizz world thus becomes an image of a postmodern consciousness that recognizes the traditional cultural hierarchies and certainly no longer divides between E- and U-culture. In other words, an awareness that only discovers the whole in the unabashed enjoyment of diversity. "

- Uwe Wittstock : Die Welt from August 10, 2009

Publications (selection)

Awards

literature

  • Klaus Strzyz and Andreas C. Knigge : Disney from the inside. Talks about the empire of the mouse . With a foreword by Carl Barks. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-548-36551-5
  • Klaus Schikowski : The comic: history, styles, artists . Reclam Publishing House, 2014

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Strizz-Comic , FAZ.net
  2. ^ Last episode ( memento of January 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), FAZ.net
  3. ↑ The great comic autobiography of the cult comic artist
  4. ↑ Volker Reiches "Kiesgrubennacht" look into the abyss , review by Lars von Törne in Der Tagesspiegel from November 25, 2013, accessed March 8, 2014
  5. ^ New comic series "Snirks Café" The return of the Volker Reiche , FAZ from February 11, 2014, accessed March 8, 2014
  6. ↑ Uwe Wittstock : Volker Reiches Comics combine E and U culture , Die Welt , August 8, 2009
  7. ↑ Stiftung Marktwirtschaft SWIFT Prize
personal data
SURNAME Rich people, people
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German comic artist
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Belzig , Brandenburg