They’re young, talented and self-assured. Women manga artists from Germany are succeeding: Their publishers note rising circulations, the fan community is growing. A stroll through the German manga scene reveals how diverse this genre is.
Since her earliest youth, Anike Hage has been a Germangaka, as German women manga artists are affectionately called by their fans. Hage, born in 1985 in Wolfenbüttel, has been working as a professional comic artist since winning second place in a talent contest. In 2007, she was awarded the Sondermann Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair for her girls’ soccer story Gothic Sports, and in 2011 an additional Sondermann followed for her adaptation of the young people’s classic Die Wolke (i.e. the cloud) by Gudrun Pausewang.