W the Whore

The experiences of womanhood are heightened and transformed in these eerie, fairy tale–like comics by a gifted artist-writer duo.

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West German–born Katrin de Vries read a magazine featuring the drawings of the East German–born Anke Feuchtenberger. De Vries wrote to ask Feuchtenberger if she might want to collaborate, and together they’ve produced some of the most striking German comics of the last thirty years, most notably W the Whore.

Collected here in English for the first time, W the Whore, W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, and W the Whore Throws the Glove present the shared vision of de Vries and Feuchtenberger at its most ambitious. The titular heroine, W the Whore, drawn in a shifting guise by Feuchtenberger, navigates the tedious rituals of womanhood, the unsettling mysteries of male desire, and the strangeness of motherhood, all while moving through a familiar but hostile everyday landscape of houses, factories, rail yards, and other ominous structures. An intimate and captivating work of comics, W the Whore is a testament to the challenges of existing in the bodies that we have been fated to inhabit, and what we do to persevere.

Anke Feuchtenberger is a German artist and cartoonist. She studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin. Since 1997 she has held a professorship in drawing and graphic narration at the University of Applied Science in Hamburg. Feuchtenberger emerged as a comic artist and started exhibiting and publishing internationally in the 1990s. She lives in Hamburg and Vorpommern, Germany.

Katrin de Vries is a German writer. She lives with her family in Bunde, Germany.
 
Mark David Nevins is a writer and translator. His work has appeared in the Swiss comics magazine STRAPAZIN and his comics translations include Lone Racer, Exlibris, and Tango with Death. He has served as a special editor for the Belgian comics publisher Bries, as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Festival, and was a founding member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Comic Art. 
 
Madeleine Schwartz is a journalist and editor based in Paris whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.