On D-Gruppe and Whether The First Truly German Super Heroes Are Dead and Buried?

 

A problem I have is that I am never happy with my own work. Scripts and stories yes. They are passable and entertaining. However, my artwork I am never satisfied with. Ben Dilworth once said "One day you will produce a comic masterpiece and look at it and say 'it's okay' and next day 'it's utter s**t!"  

Yeah. I often wish that I had an over inflated ego like a lot of comic artists -then I might be happy!  The problem is that my original D-Gruppe strip back in 1986/87 was pencilled by me and inked by...Ben Dilworth so I had that to look at and realise I was not cutting it!

Below: the first published in English and German art for D-Gruppe with pencils by me and inks by Ben Dilworth (c)2024 T. Hooper-Scharf/Ben R. Dilworth/BTC&B

I have a lot of D-Gruppe story and to be honest I doubt most of it will ever be seen. The question in my mind all the time is whether anyone will actually buy the finished comics? Had Bastei Verlag gone ahead in the early 1990s and published the D-Gruppe comic that would have been a start. Calibre Comics just fell through when the company collapsed and so it's all come down to self-publishing and that does not make me money to live on. Also, despite there being a lot of views from Germany (3.14K) and over at Comic Bits Online the views from Germany total 117K and the D-Gruppe posts get a lot of views but no one from Germany interested enough to buy. Is all the work involved in putting a D-Gruppe comic togethjer worth it?

I know someone is going to say "Super heroes? In Germany? But we have no skyscrapers!" (and believe me that is said about British characters, too. But there have been super hero attempts in Germany (long after D-Gruppe debuted):

https://hoopercomicart.blogspot.com/2015/11/super-heroes-in-german-comics.html

I have already uploaded an old CBO post on why German super heroes -super heroes in any country- are possible so let's get  the negative nonsense out of the way.

The problem is still the same -you need people to buy and to read a title and while Jean-Marc Lofficer convince Image Comics some year back to publish a 6 issue series featuring French super heroes -Strangers- would an American publisher be willing to try German super heroes?   

There is no reason why German super heroes/adventurers should not sell in a market in which super hero books flourish. But it is getting the books into the right places and hands and making it easy to order online with no international shipping is not doing it. 

We'll see as D-Gruppe are mixing it up in my head daily and I need to exorcise those comic folk!