Küss die Hand!

May 5, 2003 6:43 PM

Manfred Deix is a caricaturist/satirist whose outrageous cartoons zero in on the sordid sexuality, racist politics, and other rather disturbing aspects of Austrian culture, with a distinctly Tyrolian flair. Understanding his work doesn't necessarily require fluency in Austro-Bavarian, but it sure helps sometimes (Caution: many of these images are NSFW).
posted by MrBaliHai (7 comments total)

YES! He used to be in Wiener every month, a German mag in the 80s. I'm permanently Deix-damaged. Thank you, MrBaliHai.
posted by muckster at 8:09 PM on May 5, 2003

Deix's drawing style happily reminds me of Steve Brodner.
posted by bruceo at 8:16 PM on May 5, 2003

bruceo, it reminds me a bit of Brodner too. His subject matter is closer to that of Bill Plimpton if you ask me though...

[note: no one did, purely for sake of discussion].

MrBaliHai, thanks for showing this! I've not been so impressed with an artist since I first saw Dali's immense collection of drawings. Makes me wonder if i'll ever amass such a collection of a single medium as well.
posted by phylum sinter at 9:43 PM on May 5, 2003

Highly disturbing stuff. Thanks!

For some reason, reminds me of both the art style and the violent/sexual content of Tanino Liberatore and Stefano Tamburini's RanXerox.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 12:01 AM on May 6, 2003

That last one: "Following discussions about GE maize, it has become clear that many farmers have absolutely no objection to genetic or similar experiments, but on the contrary, they recognise a [potential] enormous improvement in their situation.

Specially bred Dairy Piglet; Riding Hen (or Hen Ride); Sense Boy (or Boy Senser); Special Farmwife (or special wench).

Thanks, MBH!
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:12 AM on May 6, 2003

Thanks, everyone, for the additional links. Thanks also, Herr Spleen, for the impromptu translation. I have a couple of Deix books, and used to spend many an hour analyzing some of the wordier cartoons, difficult sometimes since much of what he does is in an Austrian-Bavarian dialect, not High German.

Deix is the only artist I know whose work can get a museum full of Northern Germans to laugh out loud. I attended a retrospective of his work in Hamburg back in the the early '90s and was amazed to hear all these normally dour Prussians having their funnybones tickled.
posted by MrBaliHai at 4:25 AM on May 6, 2003

phylum, yeah, Bill Plympton sprang instantly to mind when I saw these, and though I can see a little Brodner too (especially in the more derisive attitude), Diex seems to avoid those stretched-out pointy extremities Brodner likes so much, in favor of the more plump, rounded forms of Plympton. It's not a question of plagiarism, but does anybody know the chronology - who saw whose work first? Or is it just two cartoonists simultaneously developing a certain faux-cutesy style half a world away?
posted by soyjoy at 8:29 AM on May 6, 2003