Not a conference report: some notes on ComFor 2012

These are just some things that I looked up after the annual conference of the German Society for Comics Studies had ended last Sunday:

• In his opening speech, Dietrich Grünewald mentioned Jacques Callot’s series of etchings, Les Misères de la Guerre, as an early example of a political picture story. I wondered if this series is available digitally in its entirety somewhere on the web. This doesn’t seem to be the case: all 18 prints can be found, but not in one place. The most complete sites I could find are an article by Katie Hornstein (plates no. 2-6, 8, 10-11, 15-18), and a website of the Université de Liège (4, 6-7, 9, 12-13, 17). The remaining plates (1/title page and 14) can be found at Wikimedia Commons.

• Louise C. Larsen mentioned Peter Kürten in her talk, a German serial killer in the 1920s and 30s. His English and German Wikipedia entries are quite detailed. Kürten’s case is quite similar to that of Fritz Haarmann, which has already been adapted into a comic by Peer Meter (German homepage: http://peermeter.de/ – see also Juliane Blank’s talk at last year’s ComFor conference): both committed their crimes at around the same time, both were called “vampire” (“vampire of Düsseldorf” and “vampire (or werewolf) of Hanover”, respectively), and the brains of both were examined and preserved by scientists after their execution.

• In Rikke Platz Cortsen‘s presentation on Rasmus Klump (a.k.a. Petzi), I saw the original Danish strips for the first time, and realized that the German translations are drastically shortened. Furthermore, the German translations vary from edition to edition: the German website http://www.petzi-forschung.de offers an interesting overview of all the German editions.

• Was Martin Frenzel‘s presentation the longest ever (338 slides)? Not even close. The longest I found on slideshare has 919 slides, and there’s a YouTube video consisting of 1604 slides (although I doubt that these were really shown in a talk).

• Hartmut Nonnenmacher mentioned a Spanish comic creator called Kim. Could this be the same Kim who was the artist on the German comic Kleiner Thor? No, they are two different people: the Spanish Kim’s real name is Joaquim Aubert Puigarnau (cf. his Spanish Wikipedia entry), whereas the other Kim is from Germany and called Kim Schmidt (German Wikipedia).

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