In February 1934, Engelbert Dolfuss’s regime outlawed the Austrian Social Democratic Party and took over its various newspapers, many of which were “normalized” – integrated into a nationalist and anti-socialist, but also anti-Nazi, worldview.

One of these newspapers was the weekly Die Unzufriedene, founded in 1923 under the editorship of Eugenie Brandt to expose the oppression of working-class women – though it soon came to include kitschy serialized novels as well. Now, however, the paper was handed over to a male editor, Fritz Robert Kirchner; its new title, Das Kleine Frauenblatt, heralded the replacement of social criticism by dress patterns and holiday recipes. One innovation in the paper’s new incarnation was the addition of comic strips; curiously, none of these seemed particularly aimed at women.

A possible exception was the final strip, Otto Bittner’s Wendelin, whose protagonist was a bachelor with an adopted son, Peperl. Wendelin’s mission in life was to educate Peperl that women were unnecessary; but predictably, his attempts to perform the simplest household tasks – cooking, cleaning or mending – always light-heartedly proved the opposite. More unusually still for the period, however: in one of the final strips to appear, not only does Wendelin’s attempt at cross-dressing during a Fasching ball result in an apparent same-sex kiss and a subsequent beating, but his hiding the incident from Peperl also puts his desire to do without women into a somewhat different light.