European Graphic Novels+

It started when I sneaked into the adult comic department of my local library, in the early nineties and (much too early for my twelve year old mind) read the works of Matthias Schultheiss for the first time. His drawing and his colouring has always stood out to me and for good reason. He is respected as one of the biggest german comic artists, especially for his releases during the eighties.

Today I would like to give you a little peek into his most renowned series, The Sharks of Lagos. The story revolves around the adventures and struggles of main character Patrick Lambert, a former sailor who turned into a pirate. The modern piracy scenario is depicted with painful realism, which I was unaware of as a kid. In fact, twelve year old me thought it was hyperbolic to the extreme. Well, adult me knows that I could not have been more wrong. If you are unfamiliar with nowadays piracy and it´s social and political background, I very much recommend watching this unusually well done documentary (Englisch) on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfanBWX3Fwg

After watching it you will see that in fact nothing in the comics is too exaggerated, at least in the first cycle of the story. Let´s start with the cover art of the series:

First cycle, published 1987-1990:

Second cycle, published 2014-2020:

As you can see, Schultheiss took quite a long pause between the cycles. The success of the first cycle of The Sharks of Lagos and also of The Truth about Shelby caused his subsequent breakthrough as a comic artist, which culminated in him -as the first german comic artist ever- getting his own exhibition, at the 1992 comic festival in Angoulême.

Fueled by success, Schultheiss then went on and attempted to conquer the US and the Japanese markets. Therefore he developed his version of an american super hero series called Propellerman and a manga series called In the Center of Madness. Both flopped on the targeted markets. Disappointed, he turned away from comics and became a writer of scripts for TV shows and children books.

It took fifteen years until he tried again and had a successful comeback with Woman On The River and Daddy, leading to the continuation of The Sharks of Lagos, after his former publisher Splitter approached him and asked if he might want to go on with the series.

Naturally the visual styles of the two cycles are different from each other after such a long temporal gap. It starts with the technique, the first cycle was done in the old school analog style of the eighties, while when doing the second cycle Schultheiss had already switched to working digitally. It goes on with the layout, which is quite traditional in the first cycle but has the panels liberally distributed all over the place in the second, whenever it fits the plot.

The writing style also changed. The first cycle was already full of brutal violence, rape and cruelty but always in ways to be expected from a realistic modern piracy scenario. In the second cycle the violence has a somehow sadistic look to me in the way it is presented and also seems to be more of a tool to illustrate Lambert´s transition from a badass pirate into a comicesque supervillain but enough of the spoilers, let´s get to the samples:

First cycle:

Voodoo Tricks

Survival

Mass Execution

Second cycle

Defying the Elements

Phở

Boarding Party