The whole universe worships the Little Prince, who sees everything ‘with his heart’—but no one pays any attention to his cousin, Fat Princess Petronia. In contrast to the angelic blond boy, she's sullen and completely unsentimental. She just doesn't fit the princess cliche at all; She hates pink frills and loves maths. Naturally, the Little Prince has a huge planet while Petronia is stuck on probably the tiniest and most boring planet in the whole wide universe. With the help of multi-purpose worm Mirco, she tries to pep up her dismal life by travelling the cosmos by wormhole or by attempting to meet David Bowie—usually without success.
Petronia's absurd and funny adventures draw on the themes of The Little Prince, fairy tales, science fiction and the classics like Faust. The imagery is also packed full of allusions: sometimes the art looks like advertising, sometimes like a board game or even like a modelling sheet.
Katharina Greve was born in 1972 in Hamburg, studied architecture and is now a comic illustrator, cartoonist, artist and former architect living in Berlin. Among other things, she draws for Titanic and Zitty magazines and the newspaper die tageszeitung (taz). If necessary, she’ll calmly make a cartoon prediction about the retirement of the Pope himself.
Since 2015, Fat Princess Petronia has been published as a sequel in Das Magazin and is the author's fifth comic book. The book edition contains all the works published so far and a few majestic extra pages. Her debut Ein Mann geht an die Decke (“A Man Loses His Nerves”) was awarded the 2010 ICOM Independent Comics Award for "outstanding art publication".
In the same year as well as in 2017 she received the Deutscher Cartoonpreis (German Cartoon Prize), in 2013 the Sondermann Prize for the Promotion of Comic Art and in 2016 the art prize "Der freche Mario" ("The Cheeky Mario"). For her comic strip Das Hochhaus (“The Skyscraper: 102 Storeys of Life”, avant-verlag, 2017), she won the Max and Moritz Prize for "Best German-language comic strip" in 2016 and the Rudolph Dirks Prize for Graphic Literature in 2018.
Fat Princess Petronia. Czech translation by Michaela Škultéty