Ulli Lust

Back in 1984, a rebellious,17-year-old, punked-out Ulli Lust set out for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily. Twenty-five years later, this talented Austrian cartoonist has looked back at that tumultuous summer and delivered a long, dense, sensitive,and minutely observed autobiographical masterpiece. Miraculously combining a perfect memory for both emotional and physical detail with the sometimes painful lucidity two and half decades’ distance have brought to her understanding of the events, Lust meticulously shows the who, where, when, and how (specifically, how an often penniless young girl can survive for months on the road) of a sometimes dangerous and sometimes exhilarating journey. Particularly haunting is her portrait of her fellow traveler, the gangly, promiscuous devil-may-care Edi who veers from being her spunky, funny best friend in the world to an out-of-control lunatic with no consideration for anything but her own whims and desires. Universally considered one of the very finest examples of the new breed of graphic novels coming from Europe, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life won the 2011 Angouleme “Revelation” prize, and Fantagraphics is proud to bring it to English speaking readers.

Germany, in the final years of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau is a sound engineer obsessed with recording the human voice in all its variations - the rantings of leaders, the roar of crowds, the rasp of throats constricted in fear - and indifferent to everything else. Employed by the Nazis, his assignments take him to party rallies, to the eastern front, and into the household of Joseph Goebbels. There he meets Helga, the eldest daughter: bright, good-natured, and just beginning to suspect the horror that surrounds her. Based on the acclaimed novel by Marcel Beyer, Voices in the Dark is the first graphic novel by the award-winning cartoonist Ulli Lust. It is the story of an unlikely friendship and of a childhood betrayed, a grim parable of naivete and evil, and a vivid, unsettling masterpiece of comics storytelling. As Germany descends into chaos, Helga's and Hermann's lives intertwine, then finally collide. In Hitler's Berlin bunker, with the Red Army closing in, Hermann receives his greatest assignment: recording the Fuhrer's final words - and the last moments of Helga and her family.

Lust's follow-up to her first internationally lauded graphic memoir, How I Tried to Be a Good Person picks up directly where its predecessor left off. Revealing and powerful, Lust recounts her life as a young, enthusiastic anarchist making her way in Vienna in the 1990s - and of her love for two men: the "perfect companion" Georg, an actor twenty years her elder, and the "perfect lover," Kimata, a Nigerian man-about-town. As her relationships with the two men evolve, jealousy increasingly mounts and leads to emotional and violent outbreaks that threaten her life.

Ulli zoekt haar eigen weg in het leven, maar dat blijkt nog niet zo eenvoudig. Het liefst zou ze illustrator zijn, maar de kunstacademie wijst haar keer op keer af. Sinds kort werkt ze aan haar eigen prentenboek, leeft ze van tijdelijke baantjes en woont haar zoontje van vijf zolang bij haar ouders. Lichtpuntje is haar nieuwe vriend Georg, al is hij jammer genoeg impotent. Met zijn instemming begint Ulli ook een relatie met Kim. Een goede, maar tevens jaloerse, opvliegende minnaar. Naarmate de liefde groeit, komt de driehoeksrelatie steeds meer onder spanning te staan. Hoe ik probeerde een goed mens te zijn begint waar Ulli Lusts vorige autobiografische graphic novel Vandaag is de laatste dag van de rest van je leven eindigde en is opnieuw van een nietsontziende eerlijkheid. Of ze nu twijfelt over haar rol als moeder, een inkomen zoekt als beginnend kunstenaar, van gedachten wisselt met Georg of seks heeft met Kim… Lust maakt de lezer openhartig deelgenoot. Winnaar van de Max und Moritz-prijs 2018, voor het beste Duitse album.