ABSTRACT
The small German-language comics industry has been transnational in several senses since its creation after the Second World War, caught in an asymmetrical relationship and dominated by imported – though not always American – comics. The market’s marginal position and small size have made it difficult to establish the infrastructure for local creators to flourish, and in particular to create a product that can be exported. After the manga boom of the turn of the century, German comics publishers have tried with mixed success to use the respectably literary-sounding ‘graphic novel’ both to attract local readers and to raise the German industry’s global profile.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. All translations from German or French are my own.
2. Verlag, meaning ‘press’ or ‘publishing house,’ appears in the name of most German-language publishing firms.
3. Mietz misleadingly implies that Reynard’s origins lie in the fables of La Fontaine (33).
4. Frenzel (Citation2000) unaccountably sets the publication of Schindel-Schwinger in the 1980s, thereby underestimating its significance.
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Notes on contributors
Paul M. Malone
Paul M. Malone ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is the author of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: Four Stage Adaptations (Peter Lang, 2003), and has also published on performance theory; Faustian rock musicals; German theatre and film; and on German-language comic books, from advertising periodicals to superhero comics and manga, from the 1920s to the present.