ABSTRACT
With their dark settings and gritty characters in tech coats and snap-brim hats, Isabel Kreitz’s graphic novel Die Sache mit Sorge: Stalins Spion in Tokio (Stalin’s Spy in Tokyo, 2008) and Osamu Tezuka’s manga Adorufu ni tsugu (Message to Adolf, 1983–1985) have the look and feel of a good paper noir – of course, given their respective dates of publication, one should rather call them neo-noirs. As it happens, these two comic creators, one from Germany and the other Japan, have other commonalities. As the titles of Kreitz’s six-volume Mabuse (2000–2001) and Tezuka’s Metropolis (1949) communicate, they share a link to the expressionist films of Fritz Lang, too. This chapter examines the development of Kreitz and Tezuka as artists in their respective national comic traditions and relates their work also to German Expressionism and later classic film noir. By depicting beautiful femmes fatales sidled up next to debonair and daring detectives, alongside the real Russian spy Richard Sorge, actual Nazis, and wartime Japanese figures, they provocatively mix fact and fiction to produce near equivalents of classic film noir–style stories.
