Jo Rüßmann
I am Jo, a queer illustrator and comic artist currently living in Berlin. I self publish zines with my comics, stories, poems; they are allegorical and autobiographical, melodramatic and tongue-in-cheek, they are fictional planes upon which I can tie a bunch of characters in horrifying knots for my personal catharsis. They are populated with fraudulent saints, superfluous snakes, egomaniacal cyclopes and a whole host of other characters who share in common that they are a) ridiculous and b) wrong. The themes I deal with are mostly derived from what seems pressing to me at any given moment, be it very oblique reflections on queer identity, be it a lapse into nihilism, be it interpersonal conflict, love, anger.
I take inspiration from mythology, occult symbolism, William Blake, medieval illustrations and, if I am honest, a decent amount of Shonen manga.
