Ole Frahm

Die Sprache des Comics
VOLUME 179

An Aesthetics of the Comic Book

Are comics art? Should they be seen as literature? Or are they simply trash? Although comics have increasingly found acceptance as an integral part of twentieth-century culture, the medium is hardly seen as a peer to literature, fine art, or even film. There is no scholarly discussion of comics, Ole Frahm claims.

To understand comics, Frahm argues, one must turn the spotlight on their distinctive parodistic aesthetics—an aesthetics that both reproduces and reflects on the racist, sexist, and class-based stereotypes of the twentieth century. Taking the provocations of the comic-book phenomenon as seriously as its political implications, Frahm outlines an aesthetics of the comic, without shoehorning the medium into a—high- or pop-cultural—system.

Ole Frahm (b. 1967) is a cofounder of Arbeitsstelle für Graphische Literatur (ArGL), a center for research into graphic literature at the University of Hamburg, and a member of the artists’ group LIGNA and the Freies Senderkombinat (FSK) in Hamburg. He teaches in Hamburg, Lüneburg, and Kiel, has published numerous essays on and reviews of comic books, and received a PhD for his dissertation on Art Spiegelman’s Maus.