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We Want Comics: Dark

By | December 8th, 2020
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Welcome back to We Want Comics, a column exploring intellectual properties, whether they’re movies, TV shows, novels or video games, that we want adapted into comic books. Today, we’re looking at the masterful German Netflix series Dark (2017 – 2020), after spending half the year examining all 26 episodes. Dark is near-perfect television, a torturously complex time travel show that wraps up satisfyingly in a mere three seasons, and it could be left as the gem it is — but that’s not to say the door can’t be opened to explore more of its mysteries, and what we didn’t see.

A strong spoiler warning follows for anyone who hasn’t finished the series, as we will be discussing major twists and turns that aren’t revealed until towards the end of the show — this playlist is your final warning.

The “Dark” Holiday Special(s)

‘Tis the season, but that’s not the reason a “Dark” graphic novella set during Christmas would be interesting to read: not only would the dissonance between the holiday and the show generate a unique tone, but it would be fascinating to see how characters coped during their first Christmas after the traumatic events of the first season. Each episode of Dark always takes place over a certain day, and you can see how easy it would be to emulate its structure when you remember where everyone was on the subsequent December 25:

2052: Jonas was in the post-apocalyptic wasteland with Elisabeth and Silja’s militia.

2019: Six months after Michael’s death, Hannah and Ines were spending their first Christmas without him or Jonas. Katharina, Magnus and Martha had to cope with Ulrich and Mikkel’s absence. The Dopplers spent Christmas coping with Helge’s disappearance.

1986: The Nielsens had their first Christmas after Mads’s kidnapping, while Mikkel spent his first Christmas with Ines. The Tiedemanns had their last Christmas together, while Aleksander Kohler was having his first in Winden. Noah was looking after the young Helge, following the boy’s appearance in the bunker, while the adult version was recovering in hospital.

1953: The Tiedemanns and Nielsens had their first Christmas together, while Bernd and Greta Doppler had to spend it with their boy still missing. Ulrich Nielsen was in a cell.

1920: Sic Mundus’s last Christmas together.

A second special would accordingly show characters on Christmas Day in 1888, 1921, 1954, 1987, and 2020, after the events of the second and third seasons, and a third would, like the third season, explore events in Alt Martha’s timeline.

The World Wars

Dark is refreshing as a German show that doesn’t touch on World War II, but if it continues, it would look disingenuous if it didn’t acknowledge the conflict, or its predecessor (Bartosz and Magnus would’ve been eligible for conscription while living in the early 20th century, as the maximum age was 45 during WWI).

Egon Tiedemann pondering what turns people into killers in 1953

Most of the adults in the ’50s time period — Egon and Doris Tiedemann, Daniel Kahnwald, the Dopplers — lived through Nazi rule, and while the countryside could’ve been fairly uneventful even during the war, that’s not to say there wouldn’t have been any drama — Greta Doppler stopped just short of admitting her son, Helge, was the product of rape, and the official website reveals the man’s name was Anatol Veliev, indicating he was a Soviet soldier.

Doppler Drama

On that note, it was shown in the final episode (and clarified on the official site) that Bernd Doppler was the father of Regina Tiedemann. It further raises the question of what happened to Bernd and Greta’s marriage by 1986, as we never see her in the ’80s: were they divorced? Did she pass away? Why was he married to Claudia in the original timeline, when their relationship was a secret in Adam and Eva’s worlds?

Similarly, we don’t know anything about the circumstances of Helge’s relationship with Peter’s mother (whose name was given by the official site as Ulla Schmidt). All we know about Ulla is that, in Adam’s world, she only told her son who his father was while she was on her deathbed in 1987. It’s possible Noah manipulated the brain-damaged Helge into starting a relationship so Peter and his descendants would be born, but what about the worlds where Helge wasn’t attacked as a child? (It would certainly be a great challenge for a writer to convey the information from all three timelines without reading like a complete mess.)

Continued below

Agnes and the Unknown

For someone so integral to the show’s paradoxical family tree, Agnes Nielsen remains a deeply enigmatic character, with an unclear personal timeline. She was born in 1910, and her adult self was a part of Sic Mundus at the start of 1921; then she joined Claudia, and lodged with her son and the Tiedemanns from November 1953 to June 1954, before returning to Sic Mundus in the summer of ’21. Oh, and she became the wife of Martha’s son and the mother of Tronte, whom she left in an abusive orphanage for some time.

There are so many ways to approach the story of Agnes and the Unknown’s union(s): you could follow the Unknown meeting the version of her from his world (who may not have been born in 1910), and have the prime Agnes live up to her femme fatale reputation by seducing him so that her son would be born — it’s entirely possible that she gave birth to Tronte after her appearances on the show. Alternatively, you could write a quintessentially Dark story where Agnes discovers — to her horror — that her husband is married to her doppelgänger from his world, and that her missing brother belongs a time-traveling cult that is hellbent on killing him.

Agnes mentions her husband to Doris, but we never see them together onscreen

Silja’s Story

Agnes and Noah’s mother Silja — the daughter of Egon and Hannah — had an incredibly tumultuous upbringing, being taken by her half-brother, Adam, as a child to the post-apocalyptic hellscape of the 2040s. It’d be great to see Silja’s entire story from her perspective, from her memories of her mother in the early ’90s, to living with Elisabeth Doppler in the wilderness after the apocalypse.

Silja is a desperate religious fanatic who craves Paradise, and though her faith briefly wavers in season two, she seems to find peace after learning her destiny is to be the late wife of Bartosz during the turn of the century. Following her life would also lend some insight into Elisabeth’s transformation, from grieving mother in 2041, to the grizzled, one-eyed militia leader we meet in 2053.

Aleksander’s Story

Aleksander Tiedemann’s violent past proved to be the catalyst for the apocalypse in Jonas and Alt Martha’s worlds, but it otherwise remained shadowy: we know Aleksander — real name Boris Niewald — was involved in a botched theft in Marburg in 1986, which resulted in the death of Clausen’s brother, Aleksander Kohler, whose identity Boris stole. He came to Winden injured, but intervened when he saw Regina being harassed by Katharina and Ulrich, and the two eventually married and had Bartosz, while Aleksander became director of the nuclear power plant.

Aleksander's arrival in Winden in 1986

The two never meet in the Origin World, and a miniseries focusing on Aleksander would be a good opportunity to show his fate in the new timeline, while shedding light on his past. Given the clues Boris was someone who fled East Germany, it could make for a strong tale of Cold War intrigue that, unlike the shows Deutschland or The Same Sky, doesn’t revolve around an East German spy.

Sic Mundus’s Beginnings

The cult Sic Mundus is established in “Adam and Eva” as having been founded by Heinrich Tannhaus sometime during the 19th century, in a failed attempt to resurrect his late wife Charlotte. Tannhaus — the ancestor of H.G. and Marek Tannhaus — believed he could create Paradise on earth, but how? He likely attempted it entirely through occult means, and it could make for a sinister one-shot — it wouldn’t be the first time someone kidnapped a sacrificial victim in-universe.

Harold and Maude Jonas and Claudia

During season two, Jonas returns to June 20, 2019, and then spends the next 12 months with Claudia in ’86/87 (during which time he returns to 2019 to ensure Mikkel’s disappearance). Did Jonas encounter his adult counterpart at some point over that missing year? Could they have spent Christmas in the 2080s? More importantly, what was it like for Jonas to finally accept that, to undo the knot, he had to ensure or ignore the disappearances and kidnappings that happened in Winden across the decades?

Continued below

Woller’s Eye

Just kidding, it should never be explained how he was injured — an anthology by cartoonists imagining how he might’ve lost his eye, or (as was the case in Eva’s world), his arm, might make for a great series of bleakly comic vignettes though.


Like the show, a Dark comic book could be a great opportunity for German creators: the German comics market is quite small compared to the Franco-Belgian one, and more slanted towards cartoonish art styles, so it would be a chance to show off to a older, wider audience. That’s not to say English-speaking creators like Jason Lutes (“Berlin“), Greg Lockard (“Liebestrasse“) or Nora Krug (“Belonging“) couldn’t contribute their knowledge of German history and culture, but it would be a missed opportunity.

Kristina Gehrmann (“Im Eisland”), Arne Jysch (the “Babylon Berlin” graphic novel), Reinhard Kleist (“Nick Cave: Mercy on Me”), Ralf Schlüter (“Die Krone der Sterne”), and Ingo Römling (“Star Wars Rebels Magazine”) are all excellent artists who deserve greater exposure, and could easily capture the sombre look and feel of Dark.

Dark's symmetrical storytelling makes it a perfect match for comic books

How much exposure though? Dark hasn’t been the runaway hit in English-speaking territories the way it has been in Latin America and India. I personally believe that, while it may not a huge hit in the single-market, it’d be a valuable long-term investment, as more and more people gradually find time for this incredible show, and then stumble on the comics. Dark is Netflix’s (sorry) dark horse, and I fully believe it will become a cult hit like Blade Runner or The Dark Crystal, classics that waxed in status until a comic became inevitable.

Hopefully, we’ll have something new to read in less than 33 years.


//TAGS | Dark | We Want Comics

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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