“Comics almost have a ridiculous universality”

The creators of ‘War and Peas’ - a successful webcomic that has built up an international fan base through viral success and book publications - were present at the German-speaking Guest of Honour appearance at the book fair in Brussels in March. A conversation with Elizabeth Pich and Jonathan Kunz about a traveller without a destination, storytelling between panels and a universal art form that is also understood by aliens.

The motto of the German Guest of Honour appearance at the Foire du Livre is ‘Wanderlust’. Which of your comic characters embodies wanderlust the most?

There's one character that immediately springs to mind, perhaps because in a way he lives the opposite of wanderlust while secretly thirsting for it: our Grim Reaper. His job is to harvest souls, which by definition is a permanent transit, but never of his own free will. He is a traveller without a destination of his own, one who jumps from place to place without ever choosing where to go. And precisely for this reason - because he has so little control over it - he probably secretly wishes for nothing more than to simply wander somewhere, not in a metaphysical sense, but in a very simple way: a café in Lisbon, a lonely mountain hut, a street to stroll on without a mission. He approaches his tasks with a kind of dry humour that we would describe as ‘detached compassion’ - a mixture of acceptance and absurd contradiction. 

You can discover many new places, including fictional ones, through comics. What is special about comics compared to written literature?  

Comics suggest a setting, they provide colours, shapes, facial expressions - but they are not a film. They tell a story through absence in a way. Real life happens between the panels, the movement, the unspoken thoughts, basically, it is what readers have to fill in. And this is precisely where the magic lies: a comic shows a sequence, but the brain extrapolates, it adds, it imagines the spaces between the images. This makes comics interactive in a way that neither purely text-based literature nor film can ever be. They are an offer - a contract between author and reader so to speak: ‘Here is the framework, but you have to wander through it yourself.’ So, if you are prepared to step out of your own perspective and enter another consciousness for a moment, you will be rewarded. Or, to put it in less cerebral terms: comics are for people who are not content to be mere spectators.  

Due to the success of your comics, you are traveling a lot, for example to Brussels, at the moment. What is the most exciting place you have visited with your comics so far?  

There are a few, but India, the Baltic States and the USA are pretty high up there. It's a strange feeling when you get off a plane on the other side of the world and realise that people who live in a completely different culture, with completely different experiences, find themselves in characters and stories that you have made up yourself somewhere between your desk and the coffee machine. That's when you realise just how much reach we have. And by ‘reach’ we don't mean algorithmic social media metrics, but the simple fact that someone in Mumbai or West Virginia is amused by the same absurd things as someone in Berlin, Brussels or Vilnius. Comics almost have a ridiculous universality - perhaps because they combine language and image, perhaps because they function in a way that is closer to dreams than to rational thought. Or, to take it to the extreme: if aliens land on Earth one day, comics have a good chance of being the first art form they understand - and maybe even laugh at. 

The international political situation is very tense, and you have a very wide international reach with your comics. Do you see your comics as political? What do you want to convey to readers?  

Perhaps we are something like the court jesters of an age that has become a little too accustomed to the idea that everything must become more and more serious. The court jester is not just someone who cracks jokes - he is perhaps the only one who can allow himself to openly mock those in power. And sure, if you look at our comics, you could say that we're not necessarily the most subtle when it comes to political allusions. But that's never the real point. We're not agitators, we're not pursuing an agenda - we're just people with political beliefs that are inevitably reflected in our work. And that's a good thing. If there's one we want to achieve with our comics, it's to make the world a little bit more understandable and a little bit more bearable.  

One topic that is currently of particular concern to us is the way in which social media algorithms now not only influence what we see, but also how we interact with each other. ‘Enragement = engagement’ - this is the mechanism that is undermining our democracies through social media. The new playing field is designed to ensure that the loudest, angriest voices carry the furthest. And once you understand this, it becomes clear that it makes no sense to discuss fascists on these platforms - instead, the only sensible response is to give them as little room for interaction as possible. Rather, punishing them - the platforms and the fascists - with absence is the right thing to do. A charakter like Donald Trump is like the fairy Tinkerbell from Peter Pan: if he doesn't get any attention, he dies and the whole phenomenon dies with him. 

More about War and Peas: https://warandpeas.com/(opens in a new window)

The interview was conducted by Simone Hellwig, Junior Social Media Manager at Frankfurter Buchmesse.