GINCO Award Committee 2026

The Award Committee of 2026

 

Our goal is once again to assemble a diverse committee with a wide range of perspectives and expertise, drawing from different areas of the comic and manga scene, as well as the fields of research and press.

If you want to suggest yourself or somebody else, please feel free to contact us. We're happy to enlist the help of honorary experts who want to give back to the community and would be happy to do the honors, as time-consuming as it may be.

In 2026, we were able to enlist the following experts:

Johanna (Joschi) Baumann (she), artist name Schlogger (derived from the Baden dialect "des isch logger"), has been a freelance visualizer and author for over 10 years and produces at least one book per year. Since 2012, she also organizes the award-winning Fuck Yeah-calendar, which features up to 70 participants from the illustration scene annually.

Cord-Christian Casper (he) co-founded CLOSURE, the Kiel University Journal for Comics Studies, where he continues to serve as an editor. When he's not editing articles on comics of all stripes, he works as a postdoctoral researcher in English Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, focusing on early modern literature. He has also written on deep time, eco-comics, and mortality in comics – and smuggles Swamp Thing, panels, and gutters into his literature courses whenever he can.

Illi Anna Heger (xier) is a comic artist with a background in natural sciences. Their artistic focus is on non-fictional graphic storytelling. To increase accessibility, their comics have a complete text version additionally to the visual version of the comic. Furthermore, they are known for their development of gender-neutral German neo-pronoun xier.

Noëlle Kröger (he/she) is a Hamburg-based comic artist. His comics have already received two GINCO "Dear-to-our-hearts" recognitions, for "Good Person Trouble" in 2021 and for "Meute" (Mob) in 2025, published by Reprodukt. Noëlle is also part of the organizing team of the Hamburg Comic Festival, a lecturer in drawing and illustration, and, last but not least, a member of the Comic Geheimclub (secret comic club).

Luisa Velontrova (she) (also known as "Magical_Yaku") has been part of the German manga scene for over 20 years. She published the one-shot "Martillo's Mysterious Books" with Tokyopop in 2014 and has since released numerous self-published manga short stories, a series, and two illustrated novels. Even more than drawing, the stories themselves are her true passion, especially queer fantasy adventures, both as a reader and as an author.