Harald

Friday, March 05, 2010

Early Men

I had an unexpected day off a couple of weeks ago in Frankfurt. I could think of nothing better but to go to the next natural history mueum and was very lucky to stumble into this exhibition of early men's faces, based on forensic research of the skulls. Totally fascinating.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Mecki - The Exhibition at the Wilhelm Busch Museum

In the mid and early-sixties, when I was still to young to read, we would visit my grandparents every other sunday afternoon. It was like a one and a half hour walk to their home in Bochum, a miner's-housing estate. There we would have coffee and cake, watch "Bonanza" and the sports-show and sometimes my grandfather would read the Mecki comicstrips to me, onepagers from the TV- and Radio magazine "Hoerzu".
I had those, a handful of Donald Ducks and ot much else, before Asterix and Tintin came in in the mid and late 70's. Comics still had a bad name in postwar Germany.

In 2003 I was asked to take over the still on and off existing Mecki-strips in "HOERZU" .
I worked for almost a year on them, until the chiefeditor of the magazine was fired , and with him went the strips.

The Wilhelm Busch - Museum is running an exhibition on 60 years of Mecki and last Saturday saw the opening of this great show. Most of the contemporapy artists and the widows, children and heirs of the late artists were present.

I spoke a long time with Mr. Petersen ( a paintor and sculptor himself), the son of the legendary Wilhelm Petersen.Ha was pariculaly pleased, that I had brought back a cgaracter, that his father had contributed to the mecki-cosmos, captain Petersen. He told me, how his father would take a trainride to Hamburg every week to deliver the original pages, work on the sketches of next weeks episodes on the way back and spent three to four nights on the clean ups.
He was working on his farm in north-friesland the day over.
Here he is talking to Reinhold Eschers widow, who had worked as an uncredited scenarist and writer on the strips, before Petersen took over from her husband, when he was burned out.

The gallery of artists...

Petersen worked in many styles, he like many other illustrators had lost his work for Ullstein publishing due to his nazi-conform illustrations during the 30's which forced him to work under the alias "Johnny Price" in, what they called, the "american" style.