Between 2008 and 2011, the pages of Munich’s local comic fanzine Comicaze and the nationally distributed monthly Zack presented the adventures of four boys from Munich: the Mingamangas, whose collective name combines “Minga,” Bavarian dialect for “München,” with Japanese manga (a common interest of young Germans). Bini, Staffie, Vinnie and Bo are eleven-year-olds who live ordinary lives, going to school, making swimming trips, evading older bullies and enjoying each other’s company. Their ordinariness, however, is as programmatic as their diversity: Korbinian Panikowski, Mustafa Süzer, Vinh Ngoc Nguyen and Daniel Matombo are representatives of a contemporary Germany in which Multikulti may have been proclaimed dead, but “street-level cultural diversity,” in sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s words, remains a fact.

The comic’s creator, Robert Platzgummer, thus humorously decentres his one ethnic German protagonist from a too obviously hegemonic position. On his first day in his new school, Bini Panikowski, with his long red hair and his thick rural Bairisch dialect, is mistaken for a Polish girl; the well-meaning teacher exhorts, “Du musst dich nur bemühen, richtig Deutsch zu lernen, und dich gut zu integrieren.” This embarrassing and marginalizing gender/ethnic confusion places Bini on a level similar to that of Mustafa, whose Hochdeutsch is impeccable, but whose surname is even more problematic for an adolescent boy than Bini’s: “Süzer” is a homonym for Süßer.

Uniting these disparate youngsters by placing their masculinity in question may be problematic; and in fact, the comic’s attempt to confound stereotypes and clichés remains extremely superficial (Bo, whose parents hail from Zimbabwe, likes manga and Die Böhsen Onkels! Vinnie is Asian but a messy underachiever!). Such tensions are perhaps inevitable, however, given that Platzgummer is himself a member of the ethnic majority who admits that his own schooling included no exposure to minority students until its final year.

Nonetheless, Platzgummer claims that the Mingamangas “pfeifen … frech und unbekümmert … auf linke Integrationsutopien und auf rechte Stammtischparolen sowieso”; and his skilled draftsmanship, clever dialogue and obvious sincerity have earned positive reactions. The Mingamangas have been featured in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and well-reviewed in comics magazines such as Comic Report: “hier präsentierte sich endlich mal eine neue Funny-Serie aus Deutschland, die nicht nur originell ist, sondern den Finger am Puls der Zeit hat.” This paper accordingly examines the Mingamangas as a specifically German reflection of what Pieterse has labelled “transcultural hybridity.”