The current promotion of die Graphic Novel as flagship of the German comics industry marks the latest attempt at renewal in a field of production (to use Bourdieu’s terms) that has always been marginalized relative to the greater economic, cultural and symbolic significance of comics in other countries. Similar fresh starts, or false starts, have occurred regularly since 1945, with (for example) the rise of a small and undercapitalized indigenous comics industry in (West) Germany in the 1950s; the entry of import-dominated multinationals into the market (beginning in the 1950s, but acquiring momentum in the 1960s); the adoption of underground sensibilities in the 1970s; the large-scale expansion into bande-dessinée-style albums through the 1980s; and after a massive post-reunification market contraction, the embrace of Japanese manga in the mid-1990s. Despite these recurring attempts to place the German comics industry on a firmer footing, the market remains surprisingly small and fragmented. The graphic novel, however, which the publishers appear to take seriously not merely as a marketing term, but also as a form capable of genuine cultural consecration, may yet open the market to a broader, more sophisticated adult readership. This would indeed be a triumph for an industry that has frequently been described as having a history, but no discernible tradition.

And yet there is a strong tradition, which has itself been marginalized within this already marginalized milieu: many—perhaps all—of the longest-running, best-produced, and most widely disseminated indigenous comics in the German-speaking countries have been or are still Werbecomics, or advertising comics, whose roots lie in the Kundenzeitschrift or customer-oriented periodical of the early 20th century. The failure of Werbecomics to correspond to either the literary or the journalistic fields (as in the American or French traditions, for example; Kaindl 2004, 216), however, as well as their focus on economic, rather than cultural or symbolic, capital, reduces them unjustly to a footnote in most accounts. Where they are mentioned as historical precursors to the "real" (i.e., American-influenced) comic either peripherally (e.g., Dolle-Weinkauff 1990, 33-4; Kaindl 2002, 149) or more centrally (as frequently in Sackmann et al., 2005-2016), their continued renewal and existence into the present day often go unmentioned in favour of describing their alleged formal conservatism, based on an artificial dichotomy between graphic narrative with, and without, speech balloons; where present-day examples are examined (e.g., as also occasionally in Sackmann et al., 2005-2016), historical continuities either with precursors or with the wider market generally remain uninvestigated. This marginalization affects both historical and contemporary reception of the Werbecomic; thus, for example, in 1991 Mali Beinhorn and Werner Büsch, veteran underground artists and also creators of the long-running Werbecomic Mike der Taschengeldexperte, could complain to Eckart Sackmann, "Wer auf dem deutschen Comicmarkt nicht wenigstens mit einem Album vertreten ist, wird doch von der Szene völlig ignoriert" (RAAHHH! 15: 9).

This paper argues that better integrating the Werbecomic, as the origin of a truly indigenous and long-lived German comics tradition, into German comics historiography would offer a more accurate, longer-term, and better balanced view of the unique development of the comics form in the German-speaking countries.