Papa Moll
From Swisscomics
Papa Moll is, to our knowledge, the only comic strip character created by a woman who has known such enduring success. In the mid-1950s, the Swiss Youth Foundation Pro Juventute resolved to put up a resistance against comics that were considered to be harmful to youth. It promoted the publication of a comic strip without balloon captions which upheld traditional values such as the respect for the family and good manners. Consequently, the artist Edith Oppenheim-Jonas draws stories of a middle-class family consisting of Papa Moll, his wife and the perfect mother Mama Moll, their three children Willy, Fritz and Evi, and a dachshund by the name of Tschips.
The stories created for the magazine Junior present a perfect father, who is always ready to entertain his family and educate his children. Eight times out of ten, instead of being rewarded for his kindness, he falls prey to his own clumsiness and to circumstances beyond his control, with all sorts of funny outcomes. Eight albums have appeared to date. Peter Heinzer, who incidentally also draws Globi, collaborated on the previous volume and is expected to continue the series with the difficult task of modernising its characters both in terms of content and form.
