In 1972, artist Leo Leonhard and writer Otto Jägersberg published what Germany’s newsmagazine Der Spiegel described as “one of the most original books of the year … a clever collage of comic strip elements and stylistic quotations from art history.” This was Rüssel in Komikland, the story of Rüssel, a courtly mixture of human and elephant, and his beloved, Schüssel, a sentient and animated serving bowl. Together, the two produce a hybrid child, Schrüssel, and undergo a series of adventures that take them from the black-and-white world of nineteenth-century engraved picture stories à la Wilhelm Busch, with dialogue printed as text beneath the pictures, into the psychedelically coloured and speech-balloon infested landscape of 1970s comics.

Although Henry Sussman, in a misleading summary of Rüssel, is right to describe the volume as “a warning about the cultural environmental impact of voracious global capitalism and the creeping Americanization of mass culture,”[1] from his aesthetically conservative viewpoint he overlooks the fact that Rüssel also affectionately recapitulates the history of comics development in Germany, champions the contemporary avant-garde as much as the European artistic past, and demonstrates that some Americanization, in terms of the acceptance of comics storytelling, had in fact been welcomed and put down roots.