The late German illustrator left behind a wealth of wild, colorful, and just plain cool art that was as personal as it was over-the-top; let’s learn more about the work of a unique talent who turned his childhood obsessions into a day-glo statement about history, adult life, and the value of nostalgia.
Ralph Niese (1983-2020) was a German illustrator and comic book artist with a deeply funky and surreal style. His work echoes Jack Kirby at his most psychedelic; trashy Italian fumetti neri comics like Diabolik; Japanese underground fashion and manga; action figures from the 1980s; and a playfully provocative approach to color design that was his personal signature. Niese regularly collaborated with other artists, musicians, and toymakers, but his work was firmly outside the mainstream: kooky, bawdy, highly meta-textual, and so precisely attuned to a very specific set of dorky interests that it overshot mere obsessive nerdiness to land in the eerily hip, preternaturally captivating zone that is colloquially known as “cool shit”.
Ralph’s untimely passing two years ago, just shy of 40 years old, was a tragedy for the world of independent illustration. His death was unexpected, according to his friends and frequent collaborators at toymaker Onell Design, and he was definitely nowhere near the peak of his creative powers. He released one book of collected illustrations during his life—Squint: Vol. 1, published in 2017 (I’m happy to own a signed copy)—but otherwise there isn’t much info out there for people who are interested in his work and legacy.
This article is a first step towards documenting and thinking deeply about Ralph Niese’s art and his unique style. Indie cartooning doesn’t always get this kind of attention, because it’s usually considered too trashy or weird. There’s also the fact that he did a lot of commercial art—album covers, toy packages, etc.—and that sort of thing is rarely taken seriously.
Let’s go ahead and take Niese’s work seriously, not despite the fact that it’s too trashy and weird and some of it was used to sell stuff—but because it’s trashy and weird and some of it was used to sell stuff. It’s a type of art that deserves more consideration, so check it out.
In the Grim Future of Ralph Niese, There is Only War
Niese’s art is consistently filled with post-apocalyptic scenarios, far-future war, and images of horrible mutants, monster men, and cyborg death machines.
The heroes in these illustrations are often faceless, masked, or helmeted (usually with some sort of skull motif) and when you can see their faces, they’re likely to be a werewolf or some sort of disfigured jigsaw-puzzle-faced hairless robot-man. The only characters who regularly appear without masks are Niese’s futuristic warrior women, who preside over the fiery, war-torn scenes around them with steely gaze and flowing locks.
The environments in these images can feel claustrophobic and absolutely packed with robot gladiators, monsters, flames, and nuclear wreckage. We’re given the impression that nothing exists outside of these scenes that isn’t likewise overrun by mutant war and destruction. It’s an adolescent male fantasy taken to its extreme. Everything about life is simplified down to a few basic beats—futuristic gladiators fight each other, stuff blows up, and occasionally you’ll spot a beautiful woman on the horizon (who will, of course, fight and wantonly slaughter her foes in her own right).
In keeping with this sense of young male fantasy, Niese’s work often echoes the packaging and promotional illustrations done for action hero toylines marketed to boys in the 1980s. We’re talking about stuff like Masters of the Universe, Visionaries, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Dino-Riders, and other toylines featuring teams of multi-colored heroes who defend their worlds from alien warlords and undead terrors. The characters in these illustrations, much like the action figures that they were drawn to sell, are usually squat, muscular, and overburdened with techno-fantasy gadgets and spring-loaded weaponry.
Niese’s inheritance from these promotional toy images is most obvious in the illustrations he did for the Glyos action figure line (a few examples above), but you can see it in just about all of his characters. His heroes, much like action figures, were built to fight and survive in the wastes of an apocalyptic landscape. In a world like that, there’s no need for long legs, supple necks, or delicate fingers; you want to be close to the ground and ready to strike, top-heavy and musclebound for maximum power, and what good are fingers, anyway? There isn’t time for eating or tender caresses—might as well replace your hand with a buzzsaw or cannon.
This battleborn sensibility sees Niese working in the tradition of grimly absurd science-fiction franchises like the British comic anthology 2000 AD and the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop war game, which are marketed to young male “Thrill-seekers” (to use 2000 AD‘s term) in search of stories where nothing matters but battle and conquest in the far reaches of space.
Niese’s art, like 2000 AD and (to an extent) Warhammer, doesn’t present these youthful male fantasies at face value. He is always over-the-top, always bigger and more cartoonishly virile than he needs to be. His frequently garish and aggressively eye-popping color choices are a hallmark of his work’s boyish playfulness. It makes sense: teenage kids don’t dream about a world filled with mutants and robot monsters only to picture it in dull, limp greyscale. They’d dream up these battles and heroes in bright, gross-out, explosive barf pastel neon.
Days of Future Past
Niese’s work is clearly motivated by nostalgia for the 1980s. Nostalgia for the ’80s is certainly nothing new, of course; the past fifteen years have seen a lot of nostalgia grabs that reheat the ’80s for millennial audiences, many of whom are eager to pay for the pleasure of seeing the movies, shows, and toys of their youth come back to life in an endless series of reboots.
But these nostalgia retreads are often impotent entries in a “pop culture feedback loop” that has little or nothing to say about the ’80s and its iconography. Niese’s art is different; it’s not an uncritical exercise in “let’s remember” like so many recent resurrections, but a surreal and grimly playful workshop in which he reckons with his childhood anxieties about the future.
The intent behind Niese’s creative mission becomes more obvious when you realize that one of the major reasons he dwells on ’80s action figures and their day-glo apocalyptic imagery is that he grew up in East Germany just before and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
When the wall fell and East Germany crept out of the shadow of the Soviet Union, there were rapid changes: new currency, new politics, and new—but precarious—opportunities. Leipzig, where Niese was born and went to school, was really at the epicentre of these seismic social changes; it was a key city in the Peaceful Revolution that led to the fall of the wall, and it was also one of the cities hit hardest by the growing pains of reunification when, in the early ’90s, “the former East German economy collapsed, hundreds of thousands of easterners faced unemployment, and the east became heavily dependent on federal subsidies.”
Niese writes in Squint Vol. 1 about what it was like to see his country undergo such intense and dramatic changes:
Seeing the world around me changing so rapidly and my parents’ motivations shifting, I learned that nothing ever stays the same and that things could change at any point in time. Remembering my dreams from those early years; the landscapes were of a world in shambles, for the most part made up of my old neighbourhood of socialist concrete blocks, and the sky an orangey/pinkish red…A world that shows a faint past and where the future is unknown…
It’s easy to see, then, why Niese’s creative impulse is so attracted to—maybe haunted by, at times—the fantasy universe of 1980s action figures. Like his childhood dreams in the wake of reunification, the world of action toys is eternally embroiled in destruction and battle, backed by gaudily painted skies and littered with Styrofoam rubble. The figures themselves are squat and strong, constructed to live and breathe in an atmosphere of battle and change.
But the irony of ’80s action toys, of course, is that for all their ability to roll with the punches and confront any existential threat, the chaos that they face is only surface level. Their lives are strangely stable: they waged war against their enemies yesterday, they waged war today, and they’ll wage war again tomorrow. They are permanently trapped in a universe filled with radioactive explosions, faceless mooks, and spring-loaded cannons. They won’t evolve, grow, or change, except to add another sword or mutant limb to their bodies.
He-Man was never going to defeat Skeletor once and for all, and if you ever decided to take a break from smashing their plastic heads together, you’d be able to return to their stories and adventures at a later date without any continuity break.
I don’t want to psychoanalyze too much, but it seems clear that, at least on some level, Niese uses toys from the 1980s and their cartoonishly extreme images of conflict and mutation as raw material for exploring what the future must have looked like from the vantage point of a little German boy in a reunified but very tumultuous new world.
Bootleg Aesthetics
Niese writes that his juvenile brain was “flooded with western pop-culture, movies and porn” after the fall of the wall. It’s easy to imagine him as a young guy in the flea markets and back alley video shops of post-reunification Leipzig, his senses overloaded by row after row of sci-fi movies, comic books, and all sorts of shady but tantalizing shit. The years after the fall of a totalitarian regime are ripe for bootleggers who want to get in on the ground floor by selling formerly-banned foreign material before official sources establish themselves.
But even before the wall fell, the demand for high-quality Western goods in Soviet countries led to a “lucrative bootleg exchange” black market that enriched whoever was savvy enough to smuggle in desirable food, clothes, and multimedia. East Germans watched bootleg copies of banned movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and “video vans” patrolled the streets of the U.S.S.R., giving Soviet film buffs a chance to watch poorly-dubbed versions of films such as Bloodsport and Rambo: First Blood from the cramped backseat of a Rafik.
Niese is very much a child of the bootleg years, and his work is deeply indebted to the style and sensibility of knock-offs. Niese is interested in the frayed edges of VHS movie cases that were produced in somebody’s basement, in the oddly compelling hand-drawn art you tend to find on bootleg packaging, in kitbashed toys and buggy ports of pirated video games.
This bootleg aesthetic is especially evident in Niese’s action toy designs. Niese made a bunch of resin figures for the Goodleg Toys company in Berlin, hand-sculpting the pre-cast models and illustrating the packaging. The funny thing is that, despite all the artistry and heart that Niese put into these projects, most of them are knock-offs of official toys. Just above, you’ll find his “Lady Cyborg” figure, which is a bootleg version of Arcee from Transformers…
…and here is the cheekily-named “Robert Cop”, his take on, well…go ahead and guess.
The point behind Niese’s efforts here is that the bootleg is sometimes more fun and flavorful than the real thing. They are sleazier, weirder, slightly wrong and “off”, with the errors, flaws, and unique touches of something handmade. Niese contends that this makes them cooler.
Niese isn’t only interested in bootlegs as-such, but in the stuff that gets bootlegged: in gross horror movies, low-budget sci-fi flicks, erotic comics. Niese’s comic series Mekano Turbo, co-created with artist Alexis Ziritt, is a great example of his passion for trash. The series follows the adventures of detective and hitman El Tuerto (“The One-Eye”) as he blows away enemies and does whatever he wants to scantily-clad women. One emblematic story sees him fuck a nun (that’s how she pays him for his mercenary services); later on, after finding out that she is a zombie, he feeds her to flesh-eating “bhakarra bugs”.
Yeah…not exactly tasteful. But this blend of gore, campy horror, film noir, and sci-fi freakout is exactly the kind of thing you’d find in the back aisles of an illicit video store. Much like the low-budget movies that they echo, Mekano Turbo stories rarely make much sense, as if they were hastily cobbled together from other sources and edited into a single package in order to meet a minimum running time. They are usually simply an excuse for El Tuerto to deliver absurd witticisms before gunning down foes.
And yet, if it all made sense, that would defeat the purpose of the whole thing. The bootleg aesthetic is something a bit dangerous and odd, the kind of thing that you might not want your mom to see you leafing through at the local comic book shop where, in her words, the staff is clearly high on dope drugs all the time. Bootleg stuff hasn’t been produced by proper and approved channels. Niese wants us to feel the deliciously forbidden sting of picking up something strange that isn’t officially sanctioned, that isn’t polished and quality-controlled.
The Man in Me
Because Niese is so interested in nostalgia, it’s only natural that he is also interested in the awkward, difficult transition from childhood to adulthood.
Many of Niese’s comic book stories involve children or child-like characters who explore the universe and get in over their heads as they run up against wild cosmic scenes and futuristic perils. One of Niese’s recurrent heroes is the Young Time Traveller (depicted above), a young boy who has, for unknown reasons, left home to traverse the halls of time. He often ends up meeting powerful, aggressively dominant women who take control of his destiny.
The women he encounters are always dressed in some combination of superhero tights, ’60s mod fashion, retro-futuristic haute couture by way of Barbarella, militant punk aesthetics, and a dash of dominatrix iconography. In several illustrations, we see the Young Time Traveller in the background, caught in a trap laid by some femme fatale, or even getting his back broken by a huge female wrestler. It never appears like he minds all this abuse, though. He gets back up and continues on his journey until he runs across yet another super-woman dressed like a giant peanut or a Kamen Rider villain.
Niese openly said that the Young Time Traveller was something of a self-portrait; he seemed to understand himself as a perpetual kid, unstuck in time, trapped in the past but looking to the future. Yet Niese, like his boy hero, was also governed by adult desires, drawn to images of commanding women in bondage gear. So, did Niese see himself as a kid in a man’s body? Was he a man with a kid inside of him, waiting to burst out?
Maybe this image tells the tale:
Here we see Niese split apart into two halves: on the right, his old man half, shedding tears (of regret?) and disconsolately receding into the background, and on the left, his impish and mischievous little boy half, leaping towards the viewer. Little Ralph’s face is a grinning skull, frozen for all time in naughty glee; his left arm is a strip of thin rubber, and his right arm is a muscular hunk of flesh, presumably denoting that Niese’s drew with his right hand. The two halves emerge out of the discarded skin of a bunny-like creature (another of Niese’s avatars).
Even if Little Ralph’s left arm isn’t as outwardly strong as his right, it stretches and zigzags like the limbs of the classic DC hero Plastic Man, filled with errant, sassy possibility. The image of Old Man Niese, on the other hand, looks like the life is being drained out of him, and, in fact, we see a stream of hearts leaking out of a gash in his head. It seems that, with Niese’s body split open, his adult half is really just a useless husk that will fade away, and only his kid self will survive.
The two figures wear classic bandit-style superhero masks, one of them adorned with an “R”, and Niese wears the same mask in a self-portrait photo. The “R” here stands for, one would think, “Ralph”, but it also glances at the “R” in Robin, the Boy Wonder, Batman’s kid sidekick. Robin is the classic gee whiz young hero (until some modern versions made him into a bad-ass or grimly violent sad sack), swinging above Gotham and achieving great things—though, like many comic book characters, he is trapped in the never-aging permanent childhood.
Niese’s self-diagnosed arrested development elicits a vital question for modern nerd-dom: what will become of today’s adult nostalgia freaks?
Nostalgia Now
What happens when you’re a grown adult who still obsesses over Ninja Turtles and He-Man? If you drown yourself in nostalgia and base your identity around childhood obsessions, what does this mean for your adult life? Are you able to have a solid grasp on the immediate world around you, or are you constantly pulled back to the past? If you spend all your time thinking about old cartoons, will you eventually be unable to connect with adult realities?
Nostalgic movies, shows, books, and other projects are valuable when they ask us questions like these about the old school stuff that we like. These questions rarely come up, though. If we look at nostalgia-bait projects like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and the bulk of Disney’s new Star Wars movies and shows, we see very few (or maybe no) questions brought up about relevant past works and how they’ve impacted or influenced us.
When nostalgic stories do try to bring up these questions, even in a relatively basic and mild way (as in The Last Jedi, which makes some gestures towards breaking from the past so that you won’t be shackled to toxic old dogmas…it’s not quite successful at making this point, but it tries, which is good), viewers can be hostile and defensive. It seems that lots of fans aren’t all that interested in seeing a movie that punctures their relaxing nostalgic fantasies.
This is why Niese’s art is culturally meaningful in addition to being cool. Niese doesn’t claim to be a philosopher or theorist, but his art, in its playful and puckish way, is interested in a mode of thinking about nostalgia that is self-reflective and ironic. He pokes holes in his own superego and takes note of what leaks out. His first concern in these investigations is to have fun (witness his illustration of the Ninja Turtles crossed over with the Fantastic Four, above), but his fun carries with it an inquisitive and bemused glance at our contemporary society of overgrown dorks who can’t stop playing with old toys and watching old cartoons.
Niese doesn’t say that there’s anything wrong with being one of those dorks – he’s first in line to gush over his childhood passions (and admittedly, so am I) – but his art argues that making use of nostalgia should, in addition to being fun, also serve as an occasion for to think about who we are and where we come from and why we like the things we like.
Ralph Niese and I were both born in 1983, and I grew up with many of the same things that made him tick. But his work is instructive and highly relevant even if you aren’t a millennial with fond memories of trashy old comic books and plastic action heroes. Niese doesn’t offer us any great conclusion about how the toys and movies of his youth are related to the things he experienced as a kid after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor does he definitively answer just why he likes bootleg videos or images of tall dominatrix women. But his interest in exploring and questioning these things is a productive and perhaps even necessary exercise that we can all learn from—especially in a contemporary media culture that is so consumed by the compulsion to resurrect its old familiar comforts.
Notes
- I hope that this little article can help bring some new attention to Ralph Niese’s work; he was always a favorite of mine, and he passed away much, much too young. I had thought about writing an article about an illustrator for a while, and I mulled over a few choices, like Vaughn Bodē or Katsuhiro Otomo, but I felt that plenty of ink had been spilled about those artists. On the other hand, there hasn’t been enough written about Ralph’s work. I decided that his eye-popping career deserved some serious attention.
- You can still find Ralph Niese’s illustrations on his Instagram account. His final pieces are some of the coolest work he did in his career. Take a look!
- Check out this awesome gigantic mural on the side of a building in Leipzig, painted by the Concrete Candy muralist group in tribute to Niese. I feel like this is such a perfect way to commemorate him: it’s irreverent, larger-than-life, towering over the neighborhood like a big graffiti explosion. This kind of tribute feels much more of a piece with Niese’s life and career than seeing a retrospective of his work in a museum.
- I presume it goes without saying, but because I post a lot of my own drawings on this blog, I’ll just make clear that all of the illustrations in this article are by Ralph Niese.
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