And, yes, I said "in English" but it's a wordless book: the book itself seems to be identical for five publishers in five territories, but the jacket on this one is by Top Shelf, the American publisher, and is in English, which counts.
Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007 collects fifty pages of comics, a few spot illustrations, and some sketches and layouts on the endpapers: all are about this little fellow who I'll call HB to keep from retyping "Hieronymus." HB is a functionary in an office somewhere - probably governmental; it seems to be that kind of place - and it put-upon in the manner of little guys in comics and other media since time immemorial.
The first few stories tend to be longer - twelve pages, four, and then twelve again - with big inky panels, four to the page, but the back half of the book has shorter, mostly one- or two-page stories, which (mostly) get gradually less inky, have more panels to the page, and see Ulf K.'s line get lighter and thinner.
The two long stories are about HB in his office, but most of the rest are more about everyday life: he battles gusty winds, gets seasick from a ship-in-a-bottle, steps into a painting to woo a pretty girl, does some gardening, and sees various odd things happen about him.
As always, wordless comics are difficult to write about, for all of the "dancing about architecture" reasons - the words aren't there already, and need to be created new, in hopes they match what the creator intended. These long stories have devils and yelling bosses in them, but most of the material here is lighter - HB is put-upon, but he's not downtrodden and seems to be amused or quietly resilient through it all. These stories aren't realistic, but wordless stories often aren't: they're abstracted, schematized views of life, meant to evoke rather than to nail down.
It's fun and amusing, but quite short and a bit miscellaneous: it is only about sixty pages but it collects work from a decade in a style that did change quite a bit. And it's also difficult to find at this point: I had to punch the ISBN to Major Online Bookstore just to find the listing; the title and author didn't do it.
Ulf K. seems to have gone on to mostly a career making books for young readers in what I've recently learned to call the DACH region; though his German-language Wikipedia page is a good decade out of date, so maybe he's doing something else even more recently. Maybe some of those books will eventually find their way to this side of the pond; maybe not. For now, this seems to be the only physical English-language object that proves he ever lived and made stories.
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