Isabel Kreitz – The pen is my sixth finger

Isabel Kreitz’s work is diverse, highly original and deeply impressive. The exhibition traces Kreitz’s journey from the late 1980s to the present day – with no end in sight. In her early days, Germany was still considered a ‘comic desert’; her first strips appeared in the Bild newspaper, and her first comic series (Ralf 1–4) found a home at Zwerchfell Verlag. Her role models were Will Eisner (“'you could learn everything from him”'), Charles Addams with his Addams Family, and Tomi Ungerer. The grotesque humour of MAD magazine, the horror of American EC Comics, the lighting effects of Fritz Lang’s silent films – all of this fascinated her even as a student at a college that dismissed comics as trash. And anyway: can one make a living from drawing comics in Germany? Kreitz didn’t ask herself that question, but sought out allies – and then simply went for it.

She has been a presence in the German-speaking comic world for over 40 years. With horror comics and graphic novels, with children’s comics based on Erich Kästner (a brilliant extension of his illustrator Walter Trier) and as editor of a horror story series at Carlsen, ‘Die Unheimlichen’, through which she recruited illustrious comic colleagues for idiosyncratic interpretations of horror stories. And with the bread-and-butter commissions from paying clients, ranging from Welthungerhilfe to the Hamburg street magazine “Hinz&Kunzt”. The clients didn’t want just anyone, they wanted Kreitz – and you can see that in the results. “I liked these commissions,” she says. “They gave me a sense of validation that I didn’t necessarily find elsewhere.” Kreitz was never employed, she never taught at a university; she simply got on with it. Drawing – and making a living from it.

The retrospective shows: there isn’t just one Isabel Kreitz, but many, and they all speak to one another: the “Teutonic” abysses of graphic novels, the cheerful ghosts in hidden-object books, the little girl who flees her tormentors into a Jules Verne submarine … “Der Stift ist mein sechster Finger” (“The pen is my sixth finger”) – this can also be seen as a motto: for an artist who, with perseverance and curiosity, is at home in many comic worlds and has left her mark on them all with her very own stroke.

Brigitte Helbling