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1778. The Beethoven family lives a difficult life in Bonn. The father, Johann, battles with alcoholism and is deep into debts. Only little Ludwig and his talent at the piano offer a faint hope that things will improve. If only he would finally stop composing his own pieces and just play… When he will finally get the recognition he deserves in Vienna, well… that’s when he will start to lose his hearing. That’s life for you.

The inspiration for this book came when Mikael Ross was asked to do a small comic for the Beethoven Society. Thanks to this opportunity he discovered the diaries of the baker’s son that lived downstairs from Beethoven’s family… their content was so mind blowing for Ross that he decided to make his next long form comic about Beethoven, and every time you will read a quote that sounds too modern to you, rest assured that it’s an original one.

Mikael Ross was born in 1984 in Munich. After completing an apprenticeship as a theater tailor at the Bavarian State Opera he moved to Berlin to study at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee, which influenced his first longer narrative Herrengedeck, self-published in 2008. He spent a year abroad at the Brussels College for Bande dessinée where he got acquainted with the Belgian comic artist Nicolas Wouters. Together they created the graphic novel Lauter Leben! about the Berlin squatter scene of the Eighties. In 2016, Ross released the acclaimed coming-of-age story Totem, which was followed by the second collaboration of Ross and Wouters. Both volumes were first published by French publisher Éditions Sarbacane and then released in German. Even before the publication of Totem Mikael Ross began the research for his next project in the Lower Saxon community of Neuerkerode, where he lived for over one year with hundreds of people with mental disability. The Thud was commissioned by the Evangelische Stiftung Neuerkerode on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in September 2018.The book was awarded in early 2018 with the first comic grant of the Berlin Senate. Ross still works as a tailor.