Charlie Brown and Lucky Luke: Ralf König celebrates his 65th birthday with a new anniversary volume

He is perhaps the most well-known German comic artist: Ralf König, whose illustrated stories about gay men have delighted audiences and critics alike for many years. To mark his 65th birthday on August 8, an anniversary volume featuring illustrated stories that have not yet been published in book form will be published on August 5.

Mr. König, your new book with the unusual title "Plum Drops and Cream Slices" is being published for your 65th birthday. What does that mean?

This is an anniversary volume that the publisher is putting on my birthday cake. The title, okay, "Sahneschnitten" (Sweet Slices) should be obvious – handsome men, what else? But "Pflaumensturz" (Plum Crash), well… When I started with comics in the early 1980s, it was a common term in the Dortmund gay center for nervous breakdown or something like that. Incidentally, that was the only word my editor asked me to replace in a speech bubble in my book "Der bewegte Mann" (The Moving Man). I then changed it to "Ich kom' ne Krise" (I'm having a crisis). He probably imagined something really perverted by it, I have no idea what. Because of "plum" or something. I'm not that familiar with that.

When your first book was published in 1981, Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual acts between men, was still in force. Did you want your comics to make a statement about being gay, or were they primarily about good entertainment?

The latter. As a teenager in a village in East Westphalia, I was impressed by American underground comics, Robert Crumb's "Fritz the Cat" and the like. I wanted to do something like that, comics for adults. And because I'm gay, they became gay comics. I didn't realize what impact I was having back then; there was no internet and hardly any feedback. But today I'm told very often that my comics were an important coming-out aid. There wasn't much for gay people to laugh about back then, so I came in at just the right time with the bulbous noses. But I was never an activist, and I never wanted to primarily educate people. I just wanted to draw cool comics.

As a child, you were a fan of "Peanuts" and "Lucky Luke," which were also your early inspiration. Why were you so drawn to these two?

Of course, I read "Peanuts" at a very early age, in the daily newspaper and in "Stern." Charles Schulz was exemplary in many ways, without me consciously realizing it: timing, facial expressions, body language, the way he delivered punchlines. And Morris's "Lucky Luke" was simply magnificent; it looks as if it were quickly scribbled with an ink pen. I love that, the spontaneity of the lines. Later on, Claire Bretécher and her "Frustrated" were unbeatable! These days, my colleagues mostly work on tablets, which means they're technically sophisticated. That makes everything far too rounded and perfect, with bright colors that overwhelm everything. It bores me. I'm a sucker for minimalism, like my Austrian colleague Nikolas Mahler's: a thick, raised line, a nose on top, and that's it. That's what's hilarious!

Are Charlie Brown and Lucky Luke actually gay?

Nope. Why should they? The Peanuts didn't even reach puberty! But Lucky Luke had those fine black hairs on the back of his neck, which I found very erotic even as a child. He didn't have nipples, though. Cartoon characters back then never had nipples, not even the men. I always drew them on with colored pencils because I thought they'd been forgotten. How could anyone forget nipples?

Over the past 40 years, your sometimes very explicit drawings have occasionally been a source of controversy, with moral guardians getting upset. Does anyone even care anymore if a comic shows two men being intimate?

After the Bavarian State Youth Welfare Office failed to have my book "Bullenklöten" indexed in the mid-1990s, nobody really cared anymore. The acquittal by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons in Bonn almost read like a recommendation to buy! I hope it stays that way; things are starting to get a bit more obsessive these days. I've never understood what's supposed to be pornographic about my drawings.

The anger is now coming from a completely different direction, as we hear: The LGBTQ movement isn't always entirely happy with your work. Does that bother you, and to what extent do you feel a sense of belonging to this scene?

I only feel a limited sense of belonging there, but the feeling is mutual. My comics are almost never on the queer book tables that are stacked up at Pride. Sure, I'm a gay old fart and I know a bit about gay men of roughly my generation. They always had the humor and self-irony that I was talking about. As I said, I'm not an activist; I don't set out to portray everything in the LGBTQ* scene. I know little about trans people and none at all about non-binary people; it's easy to write something wrong and then there's a shitstorm! If I come up with something, like in my last book, "Harter Psücharter," I'd be happy to, but I don't make it my mission. The younger generation is welcome to take a shot at that, but that's exactly who I rarely see. I don't think anyone dares to make crude cartoons these days. That's worrying. Self-irony is healthy and important.

Being gay is fortunately much more accepted today than it used to be. What does that mean for your work? Do you sometimes miss some of the friction points?

I'm usually about something else, only my characters are usually quite unabashedly gay, because I am. But it's basically about relationships, dealing with monogamy and sex, being unhappily in love, and Shakespeare or Aristophanes or the Apostle Paul, human evolution, the Arabian Nights, gay marriage, or even HIV back then, or most recently, the coronavirus. There's enough friction there. Gay as a topic is, thankfully, uninteresting.

You are a big Shakespeare fan: How much of “Hamlet” or “Macbeth” is in your characters?

I have a whole collection of Shakespeare adaptations on DVD. I like the poetic language and the human depths in the stories. With my book "Iago," I turned several tragedies into a comic strip. But that's about it. My character, Paul, just sits on the sofa, slowly turning gray and fat, and he's struggling with a midlife crisis. That doesn't exactly have Shakespearean depth. Too much cholesterol and too little testosterone become banal everyday life for all of us at some point. But that's also, of course, highly dramatic.

You became known to a wider audience in the 1990s when your comic "Der bewegte Mann" (The Moving Man) was made into a film starring Til Schweiger and Katja Riemann. Was it great to suddenly become a star with a lot of money—or did fame also have its downsides?

Other people made a lot of money from the film. I was stupid enough to sign a film contract that was unfavorable to me without checking it. Hooray, someone wants to make a film out of my book, cool, where's the pen? Although I have to say, nobody expected the success it would have with six and a half million viewers. If I'd been involved, paying 50 pfennigs for every cinema ticket, I wouldn't have minded. But luckily I don't get annoyed about things like that for long. I'm more grateful that my comics are still selling after 45 years and that I can make a living from them. And I've never felt like a star. My noses are more famous than my nose.

Til Schweiger and Katja Riemann in “The Moving Man” in 1994.

Source: imago/United Archives

What did you think of the film and Til Schweiger?

I owe a lot to the film, of course, but I thought it, including Til Schweiger, was more okay than awesome. I've rambled on about it at length; it's a bit annoying to always be asked about this film. In every article, "The Moving Man" appears in parentheses after my name. As if I haven't told better stories since 1987.

Your comics are loved not only by gay men, but also by straight men and, above all, by many women. How come?

I think my guys have an enviably relaxed attitude toward sexual topics, babbling on the couch about embarrassments and mishaps during sex, or excessive expectations and the resulting frustration, but above all, about a lot of unbridled pleasure. That's not often the case for straight people. Men meet at my place, which is different from gender differences, with the constant danger of misbehaving or exerting toxic power. In any case, I'm very happy that I'm gay and can only advise every man to do the same, haha.

Why aren't there any German comics like yours with heterosexual protagonists – or have I missed something?

Well, if I had done all the things my gay friends do to women, I'd be the ultimate candidate for a shitstorm! There are certainly erotic comics by heterosexual artists, but they're mostly just about hot naked women, and that can quickly become downright raunchy.

The anniversary volume “Plum Drops and Cream Slices – 65 Years of Ralf König” (Egmont Comic Collection, Berlin, 192 pages, 35 euros)