Leo Flügler’s whispery graphite comic tells the story of a female boxer struggling against sexism

Leo Flügler is part of It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch 2025 – a curated list of next generation creative talent from across the globe. Discover all 65 creatives in our directory, here.

Leo Flügler is a Leipzig-based illustrator working across comics, tattooing and narrative drawing whose project Tyger Tales tells the story of Marian ‘Lady Tyger’ Trimiar, the first female boxer to fight for her rights both in the ring and in court. Working with mechanical pencil, graphite powder and pastel chalk, Leo’s soft and smudgy materials tell the story of the oft-forgotten Marian Trimiar with a ghostliness that is a testament to the overt and ambient racism and sexism of female boxing, transforming microaggressions and unconscious bias into a whispery visual form.

“It works for me best to draw analog, edit digitally and add text or colour my drawings in a second step. But for this I already need to know the text elements, so it usually takes me really long to figure out the different elements before I can really start working and puzzle everything together,” says Leo. “Most often I work with already existing stories (not strictly texts) and love to do lots of research and deep dives to find links and parallels in other stories. It’s important to add historical context and give the stories more dimension.” Whilst layering fragments and puzzling different stories and aspects together, Leo is drawn to fairy tales, mythology, transformation, queer history, archives and of course, boxing, the type of sport that exerts a violence that is softened and told alternatively in Leo’s monochrome graphite textures.

“In the case of Tyger Tales, it is really important to me to mention that all text in this book are quotes and information by Lady Tyger herself, friends of hers and newspaper articles. The story is not imagined by me,” says Leo. “The text is a rearrangement of Tyger’s stories and minimally altered to create a narrative. I am only using what Tyger told herself.” In this stunning comic-narrative, Leo centres Marian as an underdog struggling against sexism in the boxing industry – and tells the story as faithfully as possible, whilst allowing unseen moments of her life come to life in deeply felt illustrations that show friendship, pain, determination and legacy.