Two-dimensional art figures come to life and bring their creator exciting adventures. Animal childhood heroes and diabolical visitors give escape from the dreary everyday life. Abstract thoughts, noises and lines of movement take on physical form – this is what it can look like when dreams become reality.
The Leipzig draftsman Max Baitinger has for his latest book “Happy Place” (Rotopolpress, 160 S., 18 €) a good dozen comic episodes have been brought together, captivating with their surrealistic fantasy and a melancholy joke. After his books “Röhner” and “Birgit”, the author once again proves his keen sense of the absurdities of everyday life.
Baitinger has previously self-published some of the short stories, each only consisting of a few pages, but they also function as a continuous narrative. With just a few lines, geometric shapes and a subtle pastel color, the draftsman lets his own cosmos come to life.
His protagonist, obviously autobiographically inspired and working as an illustrator, plunges into a friend’s world of thought while talking to a friend – and Baitinger’s pictures convey this quite literally as a journey into the physical interior of the conversation partner.
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In another episode, the narrator seems to transform himself into a kind of braided paper band while doing martial arts, the curvatures of which illustrate the impact of kicks and punches. In between, the devil and a bulbous-nosed cartoon character give him intoxicating experiences – thanks to a visual language limited to hints, what only happened in the narrator’s head remains open.
Fly towards the happy ending on a swan
Baitinger’s first-person narrator comments on his own experiences with subtle irony and occasionally sprinkles in little wisdom, but otherwise holds back. This is somewhat reminiscent of “Little Nemo”, the dream traveler in Winsor McCay’s historic newspaper comics of the early 20th century, who himself seems rather passive, but at the side of which the readers were able to experience fantastic escapes from everyday life.
At Baitinger, however, there are not only numerous fantasy figures but also familiar characters and concepts from real life, which he incorporates into his mind games with sometimes absurd humor: dentists, the tax system or clients, for example, who come across as illustrators.
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Like the two customers to whom the narrator presents a concept for animal cartoons. However, they don’t find it funny at all – and turn out to be hybrid creatures with a human body and crocodile or elephant head.
“Happy Place” invites you to question your own everyday life, not to take everything so seriously, at least to break out of familiar paths in your mind or to break out of the narrowness of the current lockdown – even if you may not end up like Baitinger’s first-person narrator , flying on a gigantic swan towards the happy ending in a new place.
