This week I am going to start my virtual US lecture tour, in German and English depending on the audience. I am invited to talk about #PronomenWieXier in different institutions of higher education in the US. I will speak about #PronomenWieXier, German as a highly gendered languagen and languange changes. Continue reading
I did not make it on time in this 12th year of participating, but you see for yourself, I drew at least one panel per hour I was awake. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version, Screenreadable Comic Version.
In German, my mother tongue we use the same word for pigeon and dove. I learned about the white dove as a symbol for peace and always related it to the birds in the street, thinking of it as “peace pigeon”. This minicomic is about fighting people and pigeons within our cities. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version Screenreadable Comic Version.
Fellow comic artists, let’s transcribe our comics together! On the Friday before the comics festival “Comic Invasion Berlin“, in the accompanying program, CIB21 Satellites, I offer an online workshop for fellow comic artists who want to collaborate on creating text-only versions of their online comics to make them more accessible. Screen-readable text-only versions accompany visual versions of my comics to make them accessibly to comics for blind people and everybody else that uses screen-readers to surf the web. This workshop especially invites artists of comics communicating activism from and for marginalized communities. As a queer and non-binary trans comic artist, communication is very close to my heart.
Plankton is tiny, moves little, and due to industrialization micro plastic is part of it. Micro plastic is contained in cosmetics, and cars produce particulate matter and tire debris that is washed with the rain in to the ocean. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version Screenreadable Comic Version.
This Comic on the colonial history of Germany was first published in German for and at Literatur Portal Bayern. The narrator from Munich, walks through one of the streets of their town, Herero Straße. It was renamed twice, in 1933 and 2007. We follow them on their walk through the street and see their subjective view of historic events.
One needs to understand history to understand current events, like joint civilian efforts for the renaming those streets, which currently pay tribute to mass murderers and places of mass murder. And where colonial occupation of the African continent is concerned, the German Empire, constituted in 1871 was right up among the front runners. The visual version of this comic is followed by a text-only version available for screenreaders.
I love to use my comics to share my understanding of theories. The analogy of a house for explaining deconstruction is based on an article in the booklet “Wer andern einen Brunnen gräbt” by Mostafa Akhtar. In 2013 the German version of this comic and its text-only transcript were published as a guest article on the Mädchenmannschaft blog. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version, a screenreadable comic version.
For the eleventh year I am drawing at least one panel per hour I am awake. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version, Screenreadable Comic Version.
I get annoyed with the whining about quota of women on boards of private companies. One get the misleading impression there is only one axis of discrimination, that is sexism, but there is definitively more. I want to point at the 100% quota on the management level. This is what needs to be removed. The setup of the management floor is a symptom for how society is structured as a whole. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version, Screenreadable Comic Version.
This minicomic uses quotes from four tweets by KhaosKobold, Baranek, Enoerlee and Miinaaa, and cites a blog post by John Scalzi, “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”.
For Goethe-Institut Wellington in New Zealand, Sam Orchard and me and went to have and draw Queer Comic Conversations. Sam Orchard is well know for his web comic Rooster Tails. This web-comic series was published simultaneously in English and German from July to December 2020. In addition to two pages of visual version of the comic, each episode contains a text-based version, a transcript where visual information is written out as text. More on the background on this can be found in my article on #ScreenReadableComics. More information on the background of the comic project can be found at the end of this page.
I am interested in queer people that lived before my times, no matter what they identified as. I am fascinated how they broke with clothing standards of their times and how the didn’t.
I would love to rummage through an archive of all people that have ever lived, filled with what they wanted to leave with following generations, with their perspective on their own lives and with those ideas that were of importance to them. A complete archive like that does not exist, but actors_actresses, writers and other artists leave behind their creation and sometimes more in diaries, newspaper articles and biographies.
On Sunday, September 27th, a coalition of non-governmental organisations invited round for the concerted action “DECOLONIZE MÜNCHEN – Kolonialstraßen umbenennen” (english: decolonzie Munich – rename colonial streets). It started at 10 am at the end of Von-Erkert-Platz in Trudering, an urban district of Munich.
I want my comics to be accessible not only visually, but also tactile and acoustic. Therefore I need a transcription into pure text. Visual elements of the comics have to be described and the pixelated text from the comics image file is typed out. This text is machine-readable. Readers can access it with text-to-speech systems and braille display.
Wanting to make make my comics accessible beyond the visual has a lot to do with my own audience. I wrote about this in my first blog post on screenreadable comics, which includes a list of all the comics already transcribed.
The first workshop “Transcribing Screenreadable Comics” was offered to comic artists in September 2020. The workshop covered three objectives of transcribing comics. Firstly, the comic should gain accessibility for more readers. Secondly, the transcription enables text search and googleability. Thirdly, making comic transcriptions can be a tool of analyzing and getting to know ones own work.
Pixilated online comic are not accessible to everybody. A screen reader is unable to read out text from image files in .jpg format. A screen reader is a tool that converts text and HTML structures into a form accessible for readers using a speech synthesizer or a braille display. The output is acoustic or tactile. People that surf my website with speech synthesizer or braille display would not have access to the comics. How can I change that?
This comic on my complex identity also in color. There is still the black and white version. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version, Screenreadable Comic Version.
A one page comic on how my perception of closeness and distance changed in times of the Corona pandemic.
I want more control over my data, therefore I will first publish #immerzeichnen Sketches and part of my tweets and facebook updates here.
Starting this week, this website got its own sketchbook: www.annaheger.de/immerzeichnen. Posting excerpts from my sketchbook and from work in progress projects motivates me to keep going and to sketch regularly. I created the hashtag #immerzeichen to tie these posts together and enable my followers to mute the stream of visual input if necessary.
A minicomic with otters on happiness. Below the visual Comic find a text-based version, Screenreadable Comic Version.
The Monacensia in Munich invited Bloggers to experience their Erika Mann exhibition. They are part of the pubic library in Munich and host the literary estate of the whole Mann familiy. We were introduced to the house, their archival work, the Erika Mann exhibition and a lyrically live performance. I was watch and listened and kept sketching away.
Introduction of the library: “Monacensia operates as literary memory for Munich”.
My ink sketches and a view of the Erika Mann Exhibition.
We took a one week break from our daily lifes and met at Waldschlösschen Academy near Göttingen to write a book with queer short stories. The framework for the book was set by Bram and Mio, the creators of the BuchLabs Series, a collaborative creative writing project for queer authors. Queer life is relevant. Let’s make a book out of it.
We worked layers of experiences into short stories. The stories touch LGBTQ topics and deal with neurodiversity, bigotry, passing, kinds of family, and the meaning of nakedness, illness and joy. I feel full of joy for my stories and elated at the coauthor’s stories that I saw come into existence and grow. I am happy about all the insights I got from them and the input I gave to them.
