German Eternal Confusion

I take an interest in American comics taking place in Germany, or featuring German characters, mostly because I want to know if really all American comic creators are so stupid they believe we're stuck about a hundred years in the past, as "all houses are timber frame constructions and people wear lederhosen every day" suggests.

The Eternals series published by Marvel in 2008-2009 did better than most.

Pertinent plot points: There's a group of superhumans (the Eternals) who have been turned into humans. Most of them don't even remember their true nature. Those that do are trying to find the others.

One of those they find is a German engineer, living under the name Phillip Stoss. "Stoss" is an existing, as far as I can tell not very common name. The etymology of the name might be more complicated, but obviously it is the correct alternative spelling of "Stoß", which is a noun translating to "push", or a number of similar things, depending on context.

He works for "Ziffengel Motorwerks" in Zuffenhausen. If "Ziffengel" is supposed to be a reference to anything, I couldn't figure out to what - "Engel" means "angel", though. "Motorwerks" I'd buy as a name for a metal band, because the butchered grammar is on par with stuff like using umlauts ignoring that they are pronounced differently from their corresponding regular letters, but not a serious company. The correct plural would be "Motorenwerke", or, if you like, "Motoren Werke". That's what the MW of BMW stands for, by the way.

A very minor quibble: Zuffenhausen would properly be Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. But anyway, using Zuffenhausen as base for a car company was a very nice touch. In the real world, it's the seat of the Porsche headquarters.

He says his parents were killed when he was two, and, "I was sent to live with my Grandmother in Dresden. She looked after me until I was sixteen." The next thing he said about that was, "We lived above a little toy shop in a small village in the Schwarzwald." Now, the entire page was written to show up inconsistencies in his memory, what with mixing up pet names and car makes, but that is by far the biggest mistake. Since there is no reaction from his wife, or the people (probably) pretending to be German attorneys, I get the feeling it's something the writer missed. Let me illustrate:

Dresden is way out East, the Schwarzwald as far in the Southwest as you can go. Furthermore, while it's not easy to guess the age of comic characters from their faces, I don't think he's older than 50. In that case, those two places are in two different countries, and the Inner German Border was not that easy to cross.

One of the nicer points is Stoss correcting the "where did you attend college" to say he went to a university of applied sciences. The one in Cologne actually exists, and was founded in 1971. I can't figure out what "Rhineland University" is. The closest possible match seems to be the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität Bonn, calling itself "University of Bonn" on the English version of its own website. It doesn't seem to deal with engineering, though.

It may be not really obvious, but to me someone having a BMW or Audi as a first car sounds a bit weird, since they're both relatively expensive brands, even moreso around the supposed time of Stoss' youth (70s). According to my mother a VW Käfer, R4 or "Ente" was typical, with the very occasional old Ford thrown in.

Lastly, I'l like to point out that the inconsistent lettering was a bit confusing. The "interview" didn't have brackets, so were they speaking English? But the property Stoss was alledgedly inheriting was in Germany, so why would attorneys from an English-speaking country be involved? Probably just a slip.

Oh, well, all in all, even with the problems, it's better than most, and there obviously was some effort to get things right involved.

Marvel Comics, Eternals, written by Charles & Daniel Knauf, Illustrated by Daniel Acuña, letters by Todd Klein