Hugo Hercules & The Wild West / The Artist W. H. D. Koerner

A transatlantic search for the traces of a man. director Martina Fluck and graphic designer and illustrator Tim Eckhorst explore the life story of illustrator and Western-genre painter W.H.D. Koerner. Born in Schleswig-Holstein in 1878, he emigrated to the USA with his family, where in 1902 he pioneered comics and created the first superhero ever: Hugo Hercules. He became famous for his almost 2,000 drawings and oil paintings of the Wild West, used on magazine and book covers. His motifs were taken up by the big Hollywood productions in the Western genre, and continue to shape the popular imagination of that era to this day. But his colonial view of Native Americans has also come under fire. The filmmakers trip through Koerner’s life led them through archives, to the urban canyons of Chicago where many German immigrants lived at the time, and to the reservations and magnificent landscapes of the American West. Yet it’s all about just one thing: the love of drawing.