Nervenkrank #1
I don’t think Katherine has a single wasted panel here, and she has an uncanny knack for capturing a mood or moment in one quick image. Oh, and you should probably read the preview for this series, even though I don’t see it listed at her website, and what the hell is that about… eh, maybe it’s already at her Tumblr page, and technically it’s not required reading. Still, it really helps set up this world. This is the story of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld). During WWI he told his commanding officer that he was mentally ill and spent the next few weeks in a mental institution. As this was from 1915, the conditions were grim, to put it mildly. This issue starts off with a few brief images of the asylum before John’s relief. The looks on his face as he tries to say goodbye to a few of his friends (who are mostly too far gone to notice him), his halting, terrified manner of speaking, the way he flinches when a guard suddenly reaches out and straightens his hat, every one of those images tells volumes about the conditions he’s been enduring. From there he takes a slow walk back to where he’d been staying and is immediately confronted by the very nice wife of a guy who seems to be a bit of an asshole. She wants to feed him, her husband has nothing but contempt for John (who has a bit of a stutter), and John retreats up into his room. From there we see him slowly pick up the pieces of his old life and decide what he wants to keep. There’s not much dialogue here, but there’s no need for it, as the look on John’s face as he takes down the German flag says it all. Katherine has the confidence of somebody who has been doing this for years, and it’s well-deserved, as she gets damned near everything right. The only place where I could have used a bit of an explanation was an early scene where a guard drops off what appears to be a dead cat in John’s cell before taking him away, but it’s possible that was something from the preview that I’m just not remembering now. Either way this is pretty much flawless, and if your biggest complaint about a comic is that you’d rather not wait another year for the next issue, then you really don’t have a legitimate complaint at all. $5