Fragile livelihoods between Fukushima and Kreuzberg

“Everyone is someone with a story that is unique. And everything is connected, ”the construction site guard Alp, tending to philosophize, sums up an essence of this graphic novel in one scene. “But nobody sees it. We crumble apart like grains of sand a dried sand castle, ”he says while waiting for the subway at Kottbusser Tor station.

In addition to Alp, it is a good half a dozen other figures, around which Davies braided a complex action in “Super-Gau”. The Tsunami catastrophe from Fukushima released a higher-level dramaturgical framework on March 11, 2011. On this day and shortly before and afterwards, a large part of the story takes place, at the beginning and at the end of the book Davies settled two scenes in Japan.

However, the central location is Berlin, more precisely Kreuzberg. Here Davies locates a colorful accumulation of people who defy the challenges of life in different ways. Including a young woman whose mother left her early and who works in an emergency accommodation for homeless people, a writer that struggled with the world, a social worker with family connections to Japan and an alcohol -dependent bottle collector.

Influences from the USA and Japan

Gradually, the author links the fates of her characters in realistically drawn scenes in black, white and gray. Davies, who has been living with her family in Berlin since 2012, has established itself in recent years with several publications than one of the artisan artists from the German Comic scene.

Her work includes the historical graphic novel “The King of Vagabonds” (scenario: Patrick late), the Evolutions-Sachcomic „Mensch!“ (with Susan Schadlich and Michael Stang) as well as the autobiographical comic based on a drawn online diary „A Child’s Journey“About her experience as a mother. Her flowing line and above all their concise figure drawing with their delicate and at the same time very dynamic lines are reminiscent of North American master artists such as Will Eisner and Craig Thompson, but also indicate European role models.

For her book “Super-Gau”, which was promoted with a comic scholarship from the Berlin Senate, the artist has now significantly expanded her visual repertoire. In addition to western influences, their stylistic references to Japanese manga masters such as Inio Asano, Naoki Urasawa or Jiro Taniguchi can be seen in their main-made street look.

On the one hand, this stylistic mix fits the frame topic of “Super-Gau” and, on the other hand, reflects the multicultural background of several figures in the book. And also that of the artist: Davies came born in Italy in 1990 as a child of an Italian mother and a father with Korean and Hawaiian roots, grew up in the USA, South Korea and Italy, studied art in New York and moved to Berlin with her partner after the birth of her child.

Inspired by Far Eastern models

The artistic link of different global influences is reminiscent of another Berlin draftsman who recently linked in a graphic novel Berlin everyday scenes with visual manga elements and European cartoon: Mikael Ross with his Lichtenberg thriller played in the Vietnamese community of Berlin.

In comparison, Davies’s new work is more fragmentary and fewer. In terms of artistic terms, both books show how enriching it is for the German comic scene that local drafts are increasingly inspired by Far Eastern role models.

From the Fukushima cover, which the book title and the visually particularly spectacular opening chapter focus on, you should not be put on the wrong trace when reading “Super-Gau”.

The events in Japan, whose catastrophic follow Davies, clearly conveyed, are very important for some of the characters. And if you want, you can see the Fukushima scenes distributed across the plot, which are conveyed, among other things in the form of interspersed TV messages, as a metaphor for the message that drives through the book how fragile the human existence is.

Beyond the shock waves of the disaster

At the center of the graphic novel are the urban life in Berlin and the relationships that combine people in the big city beyond the shock waves of the disaster. Davies shows this so sensitively in all its facets and contradictions that the city plays the actual leading role in its book in many scenes.

The draftsman living in Kreuzberg takes a lot of time to convey the special atmosphere of her adopted home. The often wordless, mostly of the area between Landwehr Canal and the neighborhood around the colossal residential complex “Center Kreuzberg” in Adalbertstraße to be attributed to the consequences of the image, draw an artistically collaged picture of everyday Berlin, especially its Kreuzberg form. The city is shown here as a lively organism that lives from the countless small interactions of its inhabitants.

In between, the narrator always focuses on the personal concerns and thoughts of their main characters living under precarious conditions, their everyday dramas as well as their joie de vivre and shared moments of happiness.

Some central characters are particularly close as a reader in those scenes that play in the homeless milieu. The author has described these passages in an interview, inspired by her own experience and therefore have a particularly authentic effect: Bea Davies has volunteered for a time in an emergency accommodation for homeless people.