The creation of Siegel and Shuster’s Superman (1938) and the superhero genre in American comics occurred before and during World War II, when Germany was culturally isolated. If, however, prewar Nazi journalists objected to Superman’s Jewish-American origins and deployment in anti-German propaganda, postwar critics such as Fredric Wertham (1954) saw costumed vigilantes as fascistic themselves. Europeans agreed, yet continued to regard superheroes as uniquely American. A failed attempt to...

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...

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...