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And this is the moment
where you see me lying in bed.
To quote my colleague Nicolas Mahler,
it's an effort for me
to get ideas whilst lying down.
In contrast to the extremely over-expressive
superhero cartoons or adventure cartoons,
the alternative scene in America
has developed a very laconic narrative style.
They tell stories by the by, very quietly.
Not quietly, but in an unagitated way.
I like that very much. I'd describe
my own cartoons that way, unagitated.
In my cartoons I tell the story of two naive
and very self-confident girls.
We were not so naive back then that we thought
nothing would ever happen to us
and we could just lie on the beach in the sun.
We wanted adventures.
These two girls dare do stuff.
Unfortunately, she has to pay for that in the end
when she gets ***.
If this book, Today Is The Last Day,
hadn't been a success, I would...
continue to exist
at an extremely precarious level.
And I wouldn't be speaking from up there.
I'm well-known enough
to be able to live off my profession.
But it's not what you would call fame.
Yes, the black and white sketch is underneath.
And then it gets traced.
Cartoons are complicated.
You can't just put them on paper.
You have to pay attention to too many details.
The point is
that I started drawing this kind of stuff
when I was 22 and I was terribly ashamed of it.
I put them in a rubbish bin
and then I burned them.
So no-one would see them.
At the time I never imagined
that I would present this *** to the public.
So I set my brain to this scene,
I ponder on how it will continue,
on certain angles or clips.
And then...
I close my eyes and take a nap for 30 minutes.
In my head, the story continues.
My head keeps working the whole time.
In the afternoon after the nap
I let my hard-working brain
have some leisure time.
You sit outside or in a café and watch people
and don't think about anything
before you get back to your desk.
You get inspired
if you keep thinking all the time,
keep thinking about the problem.
I have to draw a scene
and my head works the whole time
and keeps moving variations here and there.
I think as an artist you can learn to have ideas.
You mustn't wait for them, though.
If you permanently reshuffle things in your head
I definitely get ideas, results at the end.
As a pro, you have to work for that.
And this is the moment
where you see me lying in bed.
Right now I'm working on the sequel of...
..the big novel "Today Is The Last Day
Of The Rest Of Your Life".
In the sequel, in the new book,
the story is about a 22 to 28-year-old woman
who tries to find a space or a place
where she can be creative again or whatever.
The main part of the story is a threesome.
So...
I have a boyfriend, and one day he...
Somehow it was...
I really liked him a lot,
but the sex was far from ideal.
He wasn't my ideal *** partner.
And I kept having these surges of emotion.
Suddenly I found lots of men
on the street attractive.
So I started doing *** drawings
besides the children's books illustrations
I was doing at the time.
Then I looked at these images
and blushed and was very ashamed of myself
and tore these drawings up in little pieces
or even burnt them so that no-one could
or would ever see them.
Today I'm more hard-nosed.
Today I'm able to act out my libido
in a very conscious way.
But I've noticed the older I get
the more fun I have to just look
at handsome men on the street
and to enjoy that view.
I wouldn't have done that back then.
Maybe I wouldn't have enjoyed it.
I wouldn't have dared.
I'm like an old man.
I can just watch handsome men go by.
But when I was 22, I was upset
because these surges of emotion were massive.
We have forgotten along the way
that we're still wild, too.
Yes, those are all by me.
I don't know if passion has to do with suffering.
But it's part of it.
Subtitles by Stephanie Geiges