German Advent Calendar – Day 12

Hello everyone,

And welcome to day number 12 of the Advent Calendar. And behind today’s door is

An Artist

A cartoon artist, to be precise, whose work has heavily inspired how I started out making cartoons for my articles here back when I was still stitching together pencil drawn elements.

Today, I want to introduce you to him, because he was such an influence for me, and I still find him funny in a subversive way even after almost 30 years.

And if you like cartoons, it might be a nice source to learn with, at least if you’re B1 or higher.

The name of the artist is “Kriki”.
When you look for that online, you’re more likely to find the French painter who goes by the same name.
And there are quite a few funny parallels beyond that. The French Kriki as well as the German one were involved in punk subculture in the 80s and 90s, which also shows in their work in some way. AND they both use existing image material to transform into something new.
I actually do like the style of the French Kriki quite a bit, so I’ll leave a link here for you too, if you’re interested.

Kriki – French Artist Homepage

And here’s one of his works.

But now on to the German Kriki.

He is a cartoon creator who lives in Berlin and back in the 90s, his cartoons would be all over one of the biggest city magazines, and I was a really really big fan of them back then.

His style was unique because what he’d do is just take a pencil drawing of something and completely re-contextualize it just by adding maybe a few “lines”, altering an eye or most importantly, adding speech bubbles.

It was absurd, abstract, silly and subversive while at the same time coming across as harmless due to the “innocent” drawing that was used which was not intended for anything like that.

In a way, this is very much what a lot of memes are today, but he did it in the 90s already and I think might still be doing it. He did have an exibition in 2023 too.

But anyway, let’s look at a few examples:

Here’s the translation:

• “What’s the password?!”
  “Piss off!!!”
  “Oh, good, with special characters.”

I don’t know… this is so absurd it’s just funny to me.
Here’s another one:

The translation:

• How much longer do we have to die out.

All he did is adding these three little attention likes to the “mother mammoth”, but he creates such a strong scene at least for me. A child nagging its mom that something is taking forever.
Let’s do one last one:

Translation:

• “Another vodka?”
  “Ah, the Russian approach… Destabilize and then come to help.”

And one bonus one:

Translation:

• “They’ll touch in infinity.”
  “How romantic.”

I mean… they’re not laugh out loud funny, but I do like them a lot. Maybe it’s just the fact that they’re repurposed. A bit like cat videos, where the cat has no idea what’s going on and how we’re laughing about them, which makes it all the more funny.

But anyway, Kriki definitely was a huge inspiration for my cartoons back when I started. Now, AI allows me to create much better things and realize ideas that I could never have stitched together from parts. But I’ll never forget Kriki and it’s still fascinating to me how this cartoon artist who I was a fan of as a child ended up influencing my work 20 years later, long long after I stopped following him.

Now, I’d love to post a link to his website here, but it looks like he stopped maintaining his actual website. So I’ll just link to his Wikipedia entry here.

Kriki on Wikipedia

There, you can find a few links with more info as well as a list of his books if you want to check them out.

Anyway, that’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into my inspirations and also into German humor, a humor you definitely have to humor sometimes :).

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments and if you’d like more examples for German cartoon artists that I like.

I really hope you enjoyed this one, have an amazing (rest of) the day and I’ll see you all … morgen!!