King of Comics

I have never been a comic book fan and never understood the appeal of reading glorified picture books nor have I ever had any interest in comic book film adaptions, but I do like the campy dark horror-comedy Killer Condom (1996) aka Kondom des Grauens, which was based on 1987 work of the same name written by kraut queer comic book artist Ralf König. Despite being an unrepentant homo with a pathological propensity for drawing massive monster members, König is easily the most famous and commercially successful comic book artist working in Germany today, so it should be no surprise that foremost Teutonic gay agitator and fag-fascist filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, Neurosia: 50 Years of Perversity) would direct a documentary about the comic king. Indeed, König des Comics - Ralf König (2012) aka Der König des Comics über und mit Ralf König aka King of Comics is just another one of many examples as to why von Praunheim is the greatest aberrosexual anthropologist-sociologist ethnology documentarian who has ever lived, as the documentary digs deep into the life and work of Ralf König, a man who went from being a meager peasant woodworker to being one of the most controversial and politically incorrect comic book artists of his zeitgeist and a rare gay artist who actually managed to crossover into the mainstream in a mostly non-affirmative-action-based fashion. Simultaneously a man who worships and fetishizes the bronze bungholes of brown men from foreign southern lands and depicts Muslims as the most primitively-minded yet decidedly dangerous philistines in the world, König is depicted as an equal opportunity offender in King of Comics, though his allegiance to quasi-hermetic homo sects in the Fatherland, especially Munich, cannot be denied. Taking cocksucker clichés to such extremes that his work manages to parody everything from the erotic caricatures of Tom of Finland to the mainstream homogenized fagdom typical of American suburban sodomite sitcoms like Will & Grace, König managed to catch the attention of the heterosexual mainstream, with his comics Der bewegte Mann (1987) and Pretty Baby (1988) being adapted into the popular award-winning German comedy Der bewegte Mann (1994) aka The Most Desired Man aka Maybe ... Maybe Not directed by Sönke Wortmann and starring Til Schweiger and Katja Riemann. Seeming like the typical gay story aside from the subject’s success at comic arts, King of Comics tells the story of a strange boy from a small village who did not ‘find himself’ until moving to the big city, being sexually used and abused by older men, dressing in drag, developing a dubious taste for dark meat, and eventually becoming a married member of the buggery bourgeois. 

 Swiss dentist René Krummenacher (who co-directed the S&M-themed documentary The Pierce File (2002) and acted as cinematographer of the von Praunheim doc Phooey, Rosa (2002)) has been a Ralf König fan for 26 years and credits the comic artist for helping him to come to terms with his homosexuality. With the help of von Praunheim, Krummenacher is finally going to get to meet his hero and luckily for him, König is no ‘spiritual queen’ with airs of anal-retentive arrogance, but a rather humble fellow who has a giant portrait of a cow hanging on his apartment wall. Indeed, growing up in the small town of Soest in North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, König even dated a chick when he was a teenager but when he failed to assert himself on her, he had to confess to his lady friend that he liked boys and not girls. Only managing to graduate middle school, König worked a banal job as a ‘joiner’ (a type of low-level carpenter) for eight grueling hours each day, which enabled him to develop a sort of ‘cerebral cinema’ in his mind where he would dream up comic scenarios while at work that he would ultimately bring to life in comic book form. After meeting a comic book publisher who found him ‘sexy,’ König published what he describes as ‘adolescent scribbles,’ which were really nothing more than crude homo erotica with comedic undertones.  With Rosa von Praunheim’s book Sex und Karriere (1978) aka Sex and Career as his gay bible and after attending a fag festival with his fat fag hag friend where he was quasi-raped, König finally came out of the closet in 1979, even leaving a note out at his workspace letting his heterosexual prole coworkers know that he is a proud poof.  To the scribbler's surprise, none of his comrades at work confronted him about his homosexuality, thus leading König to come to the conclusion that the heteros were more afraid of him than he was of them.

 As King of Comics candidly reveals, although initially disgusted by effeminate queens and drag queens, König began dressing in drag himself after entering the homo underworld, which he does on occasion to this day. Meanwhile, despite lacking a high school education, König was accepted into Kunstakademie Düsseldorf art academy in 1981 and managed to publish three full-length comics in a single year while attending school. Finding Düsseldorf boring, König decided to go to Munich where he became a gay celebrity and started becoming politically active in poof power groups. König also became active in indulging in brown men, namely a fellow who he simply describes as ‘The Brazilian’ and who, not unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder with his brown boy toys Günther Kaufmann and El Hedi ben Salem, he blew all his money on with lavish vacations and whatnot to appease his swarthy but apparently sexually virile schwarze mensch. While becoming accepted as a mainstream figure, the comic artist could not stomach the fact a hit film based on his work, The Most Desired Man, catered mostly to heterosexual audiences and made a mockery of gaydom. With a growing hetero audience, as well as the growing homo-hating Muslim population in Germany, König began making politically incorrect comics mocking the Prophet Mohammad as well as those white liberals that were too afraid to acknowledge the fact that people who force their women to wear towels over their heads might have a hard time playing nice in a liberal democracy where prostitution is legal. Now living the life of a bourgeois housewife with his young boy toy Olaf Gabriel, König downplays his talents to Krummenacher, who he sells three large paintings. 

 During the beginning of King of Comics, auteur Rosa von Praunheim asks a heterosexual comic fan,“Can Ralf König comics make you gay?,” to which the man jokingly replies “yeah.” Personally, after watching the documentary, I believe that if it were not for the comic artist’s more obsessively detailed drawings of men’s rectums and his natural tendency toward bizarre pro-gay messages, one would think König was a heterosexual mocking homo kultur in a fashion not unlike American animated shows like South Park and Family Guy, albeit taken to a more perversely pornographic and unwaveringly debauched degree that would certainly baffle American viewers. Although I am far from a comic connoisseur, I think König's aesthetic seems like Robert Crumb meets Matt Groening with a slightly and quasi-sarcastic influence from Tom of Finland. As a German heterosexual comic bookstore owner named Bert Henning states regarding König’s work, “He’s definitely on the right track in that his comics, probably without intention, are very cinematic.” While I cannot say I have seen any other König film adaptations, Killer Condom—a deranged dark comedy with special-effects work done by arthouse-splatter auteur Jörg Buttgereit about a gay twink-loving wop cop police detective who goes on a mission to uncover the dubious origins of ravenous rubbers after losing a testicle via a carnivorous condom—is certainly a rather raunchy and patently politically incorrect (albeit with a taken-on pro-gay message at the end) work that is bound to offend more gay than straight viewers. During King of Comics, director von Praunheim, who is well known in Germany for his audaciously annoying and arrogant approach to AIDS activism, seems somewhat irked by König’s Killer Condom as he interpreted it as an anti-condom film, but luckily the comic artist makes no apologies for his work. Of course, as a man who made a comic in tribute to his friend who died of AIDS-related complications, König has probably done his part in the gay cancer campaign. Indeed, König has created comics about racially pure ‘right-wing homophobe’ terriers, a gay molestation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears featuring a tranny hair-hat negress as Goldilocks and three fat hairy men as ‘bears’, a moronic and ostensibly heterosexual muscle-bound Spanish construction worker who likes rim-jobs named ‘Ramon’, and a gerontophiliac Platonic dialogue between a geezer-like Plato and a monstrously hung Narcissus, so there is no doubt that the comic artist has done his part as a cocksucking culture-distorter who has defiled the mainstream, with von Praunheim’s King of Comics being an interesting and equally incriminating introduction to his wayward world. 

-Ty E