The author keeps having associations to the Addams Family (I don’t quite see where she makes the connection) and devotes about half of the article to the question, how such a literary publisher came to publishing a graphic novel. And she keeps telling people, that it is different then their image of a comic.
Are there people in america, who think the comic is the end of the literary world (there are many of them in Germany).

Well likening it to Marajan Satrapis Persepolis probably is a compliment.

Hope this link works:

http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2008/0126/feuilleton/0011/index.html?keywords=Alison+Bechdel&search_in=archive&author=&ressort=Feuilleton&von=&bis=

PS: your documentary is very funny. I hope the television team see it!

Wo sind meinem hosen?

If I knew before, I would have someone tape it for me. To bad I just saw it now.
Here’s a link to their homepage with the teaser for the show:
http://www.daserste.de/ttt/beitrag_dyn~uid,e0twv38wcprlr6fl~cm.asp

“Surrounded by Germans for good reasons”. Now that DID make me smile. Happiness is just over the fence, where the grass is greener; just outside Beech Creek; just across the ocean; but, of course, wherever you go, as the Bechdels learnt, there you are; you can be just as miserable and quarrelsome in Europe as within overhearing distance of US 80.

The German-Americans in “inbred, hick” Beech Creek are themselves capable of amazingly exotic splendour. What would a foreigner be able to savour in a tour of duty, with spouse, through rural Pennsylvania? Sugaring for maple syrup? County fairs? Autumn colour? Hunting cabins? Quite a lot, I imagine… Or examine the fascination that AB, from Beech Creek, and her works exert on us. Splendid indeed.

Grow where you’re planted, eh? And enjoy the Germans that God sends you.

Notice that on the page for AB’s interview, they spell the name “BLinky Brown”.

I had just assumed that this was a typo, but some quick google-ing finds at least one other webpage in German where the name is spelled “Blinky”. I wonder if that’s how the name was “translated” into German (perhaps “Binky” means something “unfortunate” in German?)

(As an aside, while google-ing I noticed that the original “Binky Brown and Virgin Mary” was listed on Amazon –used, of course– and that the cheapest copy was almost US$80. Perhaps it’s time for me to dig my copy out…)

Wow, they mention Justin Green and “Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary”! There’s another great autobio book — Justin writes about his, er, Binky’s, struggle with Catholicism and OCD and adolescent sexual curiosity, the three intertwine and subject him to years of hell.
There was a reprint of it a couple years back, but the printing was substandard — I understand that the originals are owned by someone who won’t let them be scanned for reprints, so they had to shoot off old stats and good copies of the original comic. Still, it’s heavy reading if you can find it.

So is it a joke? I thought it was funny. It’s certainly possible to make friendly fun of one’s own ethnic group — e.g. Garrison Keillor and his Norwegian bachelor farmers. We are talking about a writer who explains the pronunciation of one German name by saying it rhymes with “rectal”. (See the FAQ page on this site.) Joke or not, there is a point to the panel, and I wonder whether that point will be noticeable to German readers.