The last days of August were the warmest of the year in Leipzig, but in the evenings it gets dark so early that the backyards and gardens were chilly last Friday evening. Anna Haifisch invited people to one of them to present her new book “Ready America”. It is not a comic, but it is a picture story, and no matter how you classify her work: Anna Haifisch is currently the most successful German comic artist. Not in terms of the number of copies of her books, but in terms of the attention they receive internationally. Especially in the art world.
Wherever I have gone to a museum in recent years, Anna Haifisch has been there with exhibitions – Essen, Leipzig of course, Osnabrück, Strasbourg, Paris or now Hamburg. And the same applies to her contributions to magazines and anthologies from all over the world that I have been coming across for some time.
A double page from “Ready America”Anna Haifisch/Rotopol
Anna Haifisch is from Leipzig, we have known each other for ten years now, through the independent comic festival “Millionaires Club”, which she and a few fellow campaigners took part in at different locations in the city during the book fair until 2020. One of them was the Kolonadenviertel, and at the time the sales room of a former butcher’s shop could be used there, which the then newly founded bookstore Rotorbooks had already rented but had not yet set up for itself. This gave rise to a friendship that has already resulted in several book presentations by Haifisch at Rotor. But none was as big as the one for “Ready America”. Or as great.
Still life from a colorful country
I didn’t count, but there must have been at least 150 people who gathered there. Hot dogs and French fries were prepared, there was Coke, water and beer – all very American. It had to be that way, because “Ready America” is a forty-eight-page album with impressions from the United States, seen during Anna Haifisch’s artist fellowship at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, California over the turn of the year 2022/23 and captured on site in sketches or photographs, to then be converted into A3 final drawings with ink and colored pencils in the typical Haifisch colors (lots of yellow, orange and purple). All still lifes from a brightly colored country, mainly billboards and shelves, but also some street scenes and, again and again, dogs. Anna Haifisch has a weakness for them. No one draws the floppy ears of dogs hanging out of car windows, flapping in the wind, so dynamically.
The comic column by Andreas PlatthausF.A.Z.
Her gaze is loving, but never uncritical. And Haifisch has grit on her teeth. Her perception of American society is sharp and disrespectful. “Get ready, America” is how the title of the book should be translated – a slogan that Anna Haifisch found printed on the legally required disaster protection equipment in her guest room in the Villa Aurora. The Californian earthquakes and forest fires send their regards.
Anna Haifisch’s five role models
But the Leipzig native had not set off for the West Coast because of nightmares, but to fulfill her dreams. First of all, to finally realize a children’s book idea that had been around for a long time, but this plan fell through after just a few attempts in view of the seductive surroundings (Haifisch showed a few of the resulting pictures in Leipzig; it is a shame about this book project). How could she have thought of a German story when America was all around her? That is something like the dreamland of the artist, who was born in the GDR in 1986. Her artistic role models Charles Schulz (“Peanuts”), Chuck Jones (“Loony Tunes”) and Walt Disney come from there. Two illustrator idols from her childhood and youth who have left deep traces in the work of adults, Saul Steinberg and Tomi Ungerer, also only found their artistic style in the United States. What these five artists created shapes Anna Haifisch’s art, and in America she repeatedly rediscovered the origins of what was her own origin. And thanks to a car that she took over from a departing fellow, she was able to travel widely in the southwest.
The cover of Anna Haifisch’s “Ready America”Anna Haifisch/Rotopol
Often there, especially on a flight to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the designer Anja Kaiser, who later worked with Anna Haifisch to design her current exhibition in the Hamburg Museum of Art and Crafts: “Bis hierhin geht’s noch gut” (It was still good up until here) and runs until the second-to-last week of October. Kaiser was also there at the Leipzig book launch as a co-presenter, who was able to explain and comment on the projected photos and films just as wittily as Haifisch himself – especially since a good portion of them were shot by Kaiser. And her influence on “Ready America” should not be underestimated, because Kaiser’s area of expertise is typography, and there is nothing the new Haifisch volume is more interested in than writing in American public spaces. The illustrator summed up her appeal succinctly as follows: “Everything I had been taught at college about good typography was ignored in America.”
Learning from Las Vegas
Other inspirations were more ambitious, such as the legendary architectural treatise “Learning from Las Vegas” published by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972, whose book design (at least in the second edition, revised according to the wishes of the authors’ trio) is quoted by Haifisch in “Ready America” and in a screen print made for the exhibition at the Hamburg Museum. Like the German visitor, this classic theory book was fascinated by the ordinary, all-too-ordinary nature of the American way of life and from this gained a specific perspective on an aesthetic of ugliness that not even Franz Rosenzweig could have dreamed of. Sick dreams are made of this.
But on the August evening in Leipzig it was simply beautiful. The freshening wind blew into the screen prints hanging next to the canvas, and even after three quarters of an hour of travel stories from the two American tourists, one would have liked to continue listening to them for a long time. But we have “Ready America”, published by the Kassel publisher Rotopol (which has nothing to do with Rotorbooks). Its price of 18 euros is ridiculous, and the pictures in it say more than a thousand words – although most of the drawings in the book have a lot of words to offer themselves. Anna Haifisch doesn’t even have to write her own afterword, apart from a brief (English-language) afterword.
