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Gundula Fun Facts V - Riding Along in my Automobile (1/2)

PaulEberhardt

on Sept. 30, 2010

The first panel proves that I can sometimes get kind of carried away when drawing complicated backgrounds. :/ I hope it didn’t turn out to small, but just in case here is a larger version.

Gundula is actually a very skilled driver - she only has a very own approach to motoring, like she has to most things.
In my opinion, a character like Gundula who can do just about anything must have a few serious handicaps, like e.g. being unable to use computers, or she wouldn’t be even half as interesting. That’s why I originally envisioned her as a terrible driver and later as not being able to drive at all. However, this put me before the problem that I couldn’t sufficiently explain why someone as resourceful and dextrous like Gundula shouldn’t be able to handle a car of all things. Also I felt that the whole thing might be fatally misinterpreted as some kind of sexist whim of mine. Then I came up with this version. I have good reason to believe that it couldn’t be taken the wrong way any more now. But to play it safe, let me add in that I really don’t hold with any silly prejudices. In fact I happen to know quite a few women who are excellent drivers.

This page was rather inspired by an incident in a small town near Bremen I read about in a local paper some time ago:
When the police stopped an old man and asked for his driver’s license, he handed them an old Wehrmacht document, dated 1940. This is all the more remarkable, as these things were of course declared obsolete after the War so their owners had to replace them with new, swastika-free ones as a part of their denazification.
It’s pure coincidence that he was stopped at all, by the way, because all he did was drive a bit slow and block a drive while going to a mailbox. When they questioned him, they found that he had officially given up driving a few months before and had handed in his modern licence. However, he wanted to celebrate his 90th birthday in two week’s time and had no other means of bringing the invitations to his friends, but he also didn’t want to break the law by driving without any licence at all.
As far as I know he wasn’t charged for anything, but the police officers politely convinced him that it’d be better if they drove him home now and that he called some relative to fetch the car.

I'm rather proud of the driver's license I managed to forge, even though I still haven't got myself some proper graphics software. It's based on the copy of a real one I had in my reference folder.