The personality of Karel Klostermann, whose death last year was exactly 100 years ago, is known, at least by name, to almost everyone. Some of us associate his work with the bitter aftertaste of required reading, others with the rawly realistic yet poetic environment of the Šumava region. In the Czech Republic, his adventure novels and short stories with their breathtaking descriptions of the Šumava scenery have been read by generations of readers; in Germany and Austria, he has remained in the shadow of another lover of the local landscape, the painter, poet and writer Adalbert Stifter.


Comic book writers from the Czech Republic and Germany had to decide whether they preferred to portray the poetic description of the wild beauty of the forests or to capture the harsh stories of the inhabitants who were tested by their fate. Most of the authors opted for storylines. The comics were created during the fifth symposium / biennale held in the foothills of the Šumava Mountains by the Klatovy Gallery at Klenová in 2023.


ANNA PORTYŠOVÁ (CZ) - FEJETON NO. 17
Anna Portyšová (* 1998) is a graduate of the Animation and Interactive Production Studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and an intensive one-year course in Production Team Studies at FAMU. During her studies she created two episodes of short animated videos about mental health for ZU in Pilsen. The theme of the videos was schizophrenia and burnout syndrome. Currently she lives and works in Prague and creates comics mostly in a drawer.


JEFF CHI (DE) - NEW FLUGELHORN
Jeff Chi lives in Nuremberg, where he completed his Bachelor of Design at the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm in 2020. He works as a freelance illustrator and web designer. For his comic strip "Who's The Scatman?" about the life of musician Scatman John, he won the Max-und-Moritz-Preis award for best comic debut in 2022. He is one of the main representatives of the young German comics scene and was involved in the creation of the Comic-Café in Nuremberg. It is an open comics library and café, which aims to make comics accessible to a wider public.


KATEŘINA ILLNEROVÁ (CZ) - FOSTER CHILD
She is a student of the studio of Comics and Illustration for Children at the Faculty of Design and Art Ladislav Sutnar at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. In 2022 she won the main prize at the prestigious Italian Silent Book Contest with her book debut Lost in Porcelaind. In the same year, she was nominated for the Muriel Award for Best Student Comic for her book Juiced. It was also her bachelor thesis. Her work Worlds of Words placed second in the CS.KOMIKS.21 student competition. She is mainly involved in book illustration (the book We Have a Vacuum Cleaner at Home in collaboration with Jiří Vícha) and her drawings appear in comics magazines (e.g. Aargh!). The comic Schovanec won the Muriel Award for the best short comic of 2023.


KILIAN WILDE (DE) - WHAT THE NEW YEAR GAVE GRANDPA
Kilian Wilde is based in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his studies in media design for digital and print media in 2009. Since 2010 he has been working as a freelance comic book artist, illustrator, 2D animator and advertising artist and together with Felix Schittig he is developing a continuous webcomic www.taleoffiction.com. Together with his brother and comics researcher Prof. Lukas R. A. Wild, he runs various comics projects and workshops, such as Animate Europe - Drawing Europe's Future, supported by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.


SOPHIE NICKLAS (DE) - CHICKEN WAR
In 2023, the artist graduated from the Kunst-hochschule (Academy of Arts and Crafts) in Kassel, in the field of visual communication, in the class of Professor Hendrik Dorgathen, focusing on illustration and comics. In 2018, she won the Büchergilde Gutenberg Design Prize for her illustrations for Theodor Storm's book "Ein Doppelgänger". Since her Erasmus exchange stay in Brussels, she has been living partly in Germany and partly in Belgium. Sophie Nicklas tells her stories through pictures. In addition to drawing, she likes to experiment with different materials such as modelling clay, wool or wood.