Nehoda – Ross Mikael (2022)

The best German comic of 2020: Noel loves his mom. He can shout it out loud in the entire supermarket. And his mom loves him too, which Noel knows very well. Because she grills marshmallows with him on the balcony and gives him a real guitar for his birthday. But then he has an 'Accident' and can no longer be cared for by his mom. He is taken from Berlin to Neuerkerode, a village in Lower Saxony where people with and without disabilities share life, work, and leisure. And everything changes: Noel finds new friends with whom he experiences the adventures of everyday life and falls in love with a princess at the disco. But how is he supposed to find her again? We see how pragmatically Noel deals with the unexplainable, how he builds his life from the pieces of what is offered to him, and how he reacts when things fall apart again. The 'Accident' was created as a work of a different kind to celebrate Neuerkerode's anniversary and page by page outshines a number of films that want to provide us with a 'different picture' of life with disabilities and are not even half as beautiful and profound. What did you know about Neuerkerode before you started working on your graphic novel? I didn't know anything about it at all and just googled before I went there. So I knew it was a sheltered housing, but nothing else...