Tanim

From 1998 to 2004, I wrote and drew a long-form comic graphic novel called "Tanim: Am Ende der Welt" stretching across more than 200 pages.

The story is set in an alternate Vienna in the 1990s. The population is full of alien beings. The main character is Jochen, a night watch man in a storage facility in a part of the city called Spittelau. Since he works in the night, some vampires in a neighboring building believe that he is one of them and they confide in him about their great plan. The vampires send a drone spaceship to a nearby planet. It is the planet Tanim, a sentient world with four large organs that govern its biosphere: Water, Earth, Air and Fire. They plan to relocate to Tanim, believing that a sentient planet will be an unlimited source for food for them.

While I was exporting the individual pages for this website, I came to realize that the story is actually not too bad. There are many rough parts but overall the story holds together surprisingly well.

Despite having started work on this before I published XEGO, I incorporated a number of characters from the later work. Dani-E, the intergalactic go-go dancer had transformed into the godess of evolution at the end of the original run of XEGO. She is the narrator of Tanim. I also added a battle between Captain Austria and Travellic. The main character, Jochen gets unwillingly involved in two entirely unrelated plots. In the first, the vampire's make preparations to go to Tanim. In the second, Jochen's old friend Tuttl suggests secretly sneaking into each other's bedrooms to spend the night with the other's wife. Both these plots go awry.

The story marches towards what is ostensibly the end of the world ("Das Ende der Welt"). It culminates in an all-out slugfest and the sentient planet coming to Earth.

The comic is split into three parts. In this gallery, you can again see the pages without the original German captions and dialog. I will revisit the plot and describe it here on this website at a later point.