CC Stuttgart 2023

Willkommen, Sasquatch! Sasquatch Syndicate & Sherpa Networks at Comic Con Stuttgart 2023

Welcome, dear friends. And Merry Christmas — in the language of a country that, for one of our own, was never entirely foreign.   This is the story of how the Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks crossed the Atlantic Ocean in December, landed in the heart of Germany, and brought Bigfoot — arguably the most Pacific Northwest creature imaginable — to one of Europe's premier pop culture events, surrounded by Christmas markets, glühwein, centuries of history, and a family homecoming that made every leg of the journey deeply personal.

It is also the story of a man who nearly had to change his name to succeed in American media — and refused.

But we'll get to that.

The Man Called Geveshausen
Before we talk about Stuttgart, we need to talk about Chuck.

Charles Geveshausen or Karl Geveshausen, Charles is Karl in German, is not a name that slides quietly through an American casting sheet or a Hollywood production roster. It is a name that announces itself. A name that carries old country weight, that rolls off German tongues with comfort and authority, and that — in the post-World War II American media landscape of the early 1980s — created friction that was, frankly, unfair and infuriating.

Chuck grew up German-American in a cultural moment when that identity carried baggage that had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the sins of a generation he had no part in. He pursued a career in media. He was good at it. And more than once, he was told — directly or indirectly — that perhaps a name like Geveshausen might benefit from some... smoothing. An alias. Something less Germanic. Something that wouldn't raise eyebrows in certain rooms.
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Chuck said no.

He said it then and he has been saying it ever since, because he understood something important: a name is not just a label. It is lineage. It is the people who carried it before you, the land they came from, the village that gave rise to them. To erase it for the comfort of others is to erase yourself.

That stubbornness — that quiet, firm insistence on being exactly who he is — is the same quality that drives him into forests at night looking for a creature most people don't believe exists. Chuck Geveshausen does not take the easy road. He takes the one that means something.

And in December 2023, that road led him home.

Condor to Frankfurt: Earning Alaska Miles at 35,000 Feet
The Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks crew departed Seattle on Condor Airlines — a practical and satisfying choice for anyone who wants to accumulate Alaska Airlines miles while crossing the Atlantic, which we highly recommend. Condor flies SEA to FRA and the arrangement works beautifully for Pacific Northwest travelers. File that tip away.

Frankfurt Airport landed us at one of the great transit hubs of Europe — and more specifically, at the Frankfurt Airport Marriott, which is connected directly to the terminal and is one of the finest airport hotels any of us have encountered anywhere in the world. The breakfast buffet deserves specific mention: honey in varieties that would make a beekeeper weep with joy, meats arranged with Germanic precision, beet juice dark and earthy and somehow exactly right for the cold December morning, and the general sense that Europe takes breakfast seriously in a way that puts the American grab-and-go bagel to complete shame.

We ate well. We rested. We adjusted to the time zone with the help of good food and a bed that understood its purpose.

The following morning, we caught the Deutsche Bahn train directly from Frankfurt Airport to Stuttgart — smooth, punctual, efficient in the way that European rail never stops being slightly miraculous to American travelers. Germany slid past the windows in December gray and winter brown, punctuated by the occasional half-timbered building or church spire that reminded you that this is a very, very old place you're passing through.

Stuttgart arrived. The Messe was waiting.

Messe Stuttgart: Bigfoot Enters the Building
Comic Con Stuttgart — the CCON, as the Germans know it — is no small affair. Since its founding in 2016 at the Landesmesse Stuttgart, it has grown into one of Europe's leading pop culture conventions, drawing 50,000 attendees and filling the massive exhibition halls with the full spectrum of fan culture: comics, film, cosplay, gaming, celebrity guests, workshops, Star Wars universes, Ghostbusters chapters, cosplay parades, and the collective joy of a community that celebrates being exactly who they are without apology.

Sound familiar?

The 2023 edition featured celebrity guests including the legendary Ian McDiarmid — Emperor Palpatine himself — alongside James and Oliver Phelps (the Weasley twins), Spencer Wilding, Lauren Mary Kim, and others drawing fans from across Germany and Europe. The halls were decorated for Christmas. The German winter light filtered through. And somewhere in Hall 4, next to heroes from galaxies far, far away, the Sasquatch Syndicate set up shop.

Photo ops. Autograph sessions. Merchandise. And questions — so many questions — from curious German fans who had discovered us through a channel none of us had anticipated quite as strongly as it arrived.

The Cartoon Pilot that was popular in Germany
Here's the thing about Bigfoot in Germany: there is no native Bigfoot tradition. Germany has the Black Forest, it has fairy tales, it has centuries of folklore about things that move in the dark — but a large bipedal primate wandering the Schwarzwald was not, historically, a major cultural preoccupation.

Which is exactly why, when the Sasquatch Syndicate comic and cartoon project began making its rounds — a hero team concept built around a squad of investigators pursuing the legend, cryptozoology meets comic book adventure — the German fan community responded with a level of enthusiasm that genuinely caught us off guard.

The cartoon went viral in Germany before it had achieved equivalent traction back home in the United States.

Germans, it turns out, love a well-constructed hero team narrative. They love the investigative procedural angle. They love the aesthetic of the Pacific Northwest — the forests, the mountains, the scale of the American wilderness that reads as almost mythological from Europe. And they love the sheer novelty of a legitimate cryptid investigation presented with seriousness, craft, and just enough humor to make it approachable.

At the booth, the cartoon was a conversation starter that never stopped starting conversations. Fans who had never heard of Bigfoot outside of vague American pop culture references found themselves genuinely intrigued by the concept of a hero squad built around real research methodology. Artists and comic enthusiasts examined the print work with a critical eye and approved of what they found. People wanted to know where they could follow the story.

For Sherpa Networks — managing production, media strategy, and the infrastructure behind the Sasquatch Syndicate's growing European footprint — the weekend was a proof of concept that the brand has legs (very large legs, admittedly) far beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Chuck Fielding Questions in German: A Masterclass in Smiling Through It :)

Let's address the linguistic reality of the weekend with the honesty it deserves.

Chuck Geveshausen speaks German the way a person speaks a language they grew up around but have not used fluently in some time — which is to say: with heart, with effort, with occasional grammatical detours that the ear of a native speaker notices but politely overlooks, and with a warmth that more than compensates for any rustiness in conjugation.

His last name announced him before he said a word. German fans looked at his badge, looked at him, and something in their expression shifted — a recognition, a welcome, a sense of oh, one of us, or near enough. That matters in ways that are difficult to fully articulate to someone who has never experienced it. Being German-named in a German room, even after decades in America, is a different kind of homecoming than simply visiting a foreign country.

The questions came in German. Chuck fielded them with a combination of actual German, strategic smiling, and the universal language of enthusiasm about your subject matter. The Sherpa Networks crew flanked him, nodded supportively, and managed the moments where the conversation outpaced available vocabulary with the diplomatic grace of a team that has been in tight spots before.

Smiles, it turned out, are the great translator. You can get remarkably far on sincerity, a good-natured laugh, and a willingness to meet people exactly where they are.

Sherpa Networks in Europe: Here to HelpThe "Sherpa is here to help" angle — which has driven so much of the company's success in the United States — resonated with European and specifically German filmmakers and content creators at CCON in ways that felt like the beginning of something real.

Germany has a robust creative community and a media landscape that, as Chuck knows from personal experience, has historically operated with certain gatekeeping dynamics that make it difficult for independent voices to find their footing. German creators working in digital content, short film, podcasting, and independent production face many of the same challenges their American counterparts do — and they responded to the Sherpa Networks model with genuine interest.

Cards went out. Conversations went deep.
The same "everyone needs a Sherpa" message that had resonated in London at the BFI found a new and enthusiastic audience in Stuttgart. As a Washington State organization expanding into European markets, the Sasquatch Syndicate and Sherpa Networks are, to put it honestly, a monster out of water in Europe — but a very friendly, very capable monster that is learning the terrain quickly.

No Bigfoot in Germany? Perhaps. But there is certainly an audience for great storytelling. And Sherpa is here to help tell it.

After the Con: A Family Homecoming Begins
The convention wrapped. The booth came down. And then the trip became something else entirely.

Chuck headed south from Stuttgart toward Fridingen — a small town in Baden-Württemberg south of Stuttgart, tucked into the upper Danube valley, where family waited. The cousins. The familiar faces from a family tree that stretches back generations into this land. For the crew, it was a brief parting with our leader — watching him navigate toward something deeply personal while we prepared for the next chapter of the adventure he had generously planned for us before departing.

That next chapter was Lake Konstanz. And it was extraordinary.

Lake Konstanz: Glühwein, Christmas Markets, and the Lady Who Holds the Pope
The Bodensee — Lake Constance — in December is something that deserves to be on every traveler's list. The water is cold and ancient and impossibly still in places. The Christmas markets that ring the lake are everything you've heard about German Weihnachtsmärkte and then some: candlelight on cobblestones, the smell of roasted almonds and cinnamon, glühwein steaming in ceramic mugs that you feel through your gloves before you even take a sip.

We wandered. We drank glühwein. We made use of a German interpreter for the moments that required more precision than our collective language skills could manage. We ate things we couldn't fully identify but which were warm and correct for the moment. We talked to strangers and probably understood forty percent of what they said and nodded appropriately at the rest.

And then we found her.

Standing at the entrance to Konstanz harbor, nine meters tall, rotating slowly on her pedestal, is one of the most extraordinary public art installations any of us had ever encountered: the Imperia.

Erected in 1993 by sculptor Peter Lenk — secretly, on private railway company property, before the city could object — Imperia is a voluptuous, boldly rendered courtesan holding two small, naked, hapless-looking men in her outstretched hands. One wears a papal tiara. The other wears an imperial crown. Both look, to be kind about it, diminished.

She rotates once every four minutes, ensuring that everyone — on land and on the lake — gets a complete view.

The story she tells reaches back to the Council of Constance, 1414 to 1418, when the Catholic Church gathered here to resolve its crisis of having three simultaneous popes. The city swelled with thousands of clergy, princes, cardinals, and hangers-on. Contemporary chronicles noted the simultaneous presence of extraordinary numbers of women providing companionship to the attendants of this most holy council. History is not subtle.

Balzac later immortalized the scene in a satirical story, La Belle Impéria, in which the courtesan Imperia holds power over all the men who claim to hold power over the world. Lenk brought that story to life in nine meters of rotating concrete. The two naked men she holds represent Pope Martin V and Emperor Sigismund — powerful beyond measure, and yet entirely at her mercy.

The city initially objected. Then accepted. Then declared it a cultural monument in 2024.

We stood beneath her in the December cold, glühwein in hand, and laughed the way you laugh when history delivers something so perfectly absurd and so deeply true that there's nothing else to do.

Chuck, we're told, had a version of this explanation ready for family members when he later joined them. It went over well.

Chuck's Journey: Nürnberg, Oldenburg, and a Hamlet Called Geveshausen
While the crew made its way back toward Frankfurt for the return flight, Chuck's journey continued north — through Germany, through Christmas and family, through the geography of his own name.

Nürnberg at Christmas. One of the most famous Christkindlesmarkt in the world — a tradition going back to 1628, golden and glowing in the old city center beneath the Kaiserburg castle. If you can only attend one German Christmas market in your lifetime, many people argue it should be this one. Chuck made the pilgrimage.

Then north to Oldenburg — in Niedersachsen, his family's home region. The Low German flat country, different in character from the mountain drama of the south. Older in a quieter way. The kind of place where families have been in the same general area for so long that the landscape itself feels personal.

And somewhere in that region — in that web of Low German hamlets and farmsteads and place names that have been accumulating for a thousand years — there is a hamlet called Geveshausen.

In German toponymy, the suffix -hausen is ancient — it means settlement, homestead, the place where people dwelled. German place names ending in -hausen dot the landscape of central and northern Germany, each one a record of a family or a founder or a local lord who built something there long enough ago that the settlement took their name. Geveshausen. The settlement of the Geve family. The home place. A hamlet so small it exists mostly as a name on older maps and in family memory — but a name that carries the same root as the man standing in a Bigfoot booth in Stuttgart, fielding questions in rusty German about cryptids from the Pacific Northwest.

Chuck visited. He stood in a place that shares his name. We imagine that moment requires no embellishment from us.
His son was with him for part of the journey — and Chuck, being the kind of man who believes in understanding where you come from, took him to Bremerhaven on the North Sea coast. Because that is where the ships left from. The vessels that carried German families across the Atlantic to America in the great waves of nineteenth and twentieth century emigration. The harbor that swallowed them whole and delivered them, after weeks at sea, to a new country that would not always welcome their names.

His son stood at that harbor and understood something about the family story that no classroom could have delivered.

The Autobahn: A Brief but Important Digression

We would be remiss if we did not mention the Autobahn.

For those unfamiliar: sections of the German Autobahn have no speed limit. This is a documented fact of German law. There are advisory speeds, and there are stretches of unrestricted highway where the only meaningful limit is the courage of the driver and the engineering tolerances of the vehicle.

Chuck, it should be noted, is a man who goes into dark forests alone at night looking for an eight-foot cryptid. He is not, by disposition, a person who is easily discouraged by risk.
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He drove a Mercedes on the Autobahn at speeds that he has described, diplomatically, as enthusiastic. He has also mentioned that the tires began to exhibit what engineers call harmonic vibration and what everyone else calls wobbling, at a point in the velocity spectrum that suggested perhaps the conversation between the car and the road had reached a natural conclusion.

He slowed down. He arrived safely. He tells this story with a grin that suggests he does not fully regret it.

The Pacific Northwest produces a particular kind of person: someone comfortable with uncertainty, unbothered by extremes, and inclined to find out what happens when you push a little further than common sense recommends. This appears to be a quality that crosses well with the German half of his heritage.

What Germany Gave UsWe landed back in Seattle with Alaska miles accumulated, notebooks fuller than expected, Sherpa Networks European connections established, and a cartoon property that — somewhat improbably — had found its warmest early audience in a country where Bigfoot has no native mythology.

Chuck came home with something harder to quantify. A reconnection with the people and the place that shaped the name he refused to give up. A son who now understands, viscerally, where that name came from and what it cost to keep it in a country that sometimes made keeping it difficult.

He stood in a hamlet that shares his family name. He drove a Mercedes too fast on a highway that permits such things. He drank glühwein beneath a rotating courtesan who holds a pope and an emperor in her hands and finds both of them wanting.

Not a bad December for a man from Oldenburg by way of Washington State.

Danke, Deutschland
To the fans at Comic Con Stuttgart 2023 who brought their curiosity, their enthusiasm, and their questions to our booth — vielen Dank. You embraced something from the other side of the world with warmth and genuine interest, and the Sasquatch Syndicate will not forget it.

To the German filmmakers and creators who connected with Sherpa Networks — we are here, we are expanding, and we are genuinely glad to help. That's what Sherpas do.

• To the Christmas markets of Lake Konstanz — you are exactly what the world needed in December, and glühwein is a technology that deserves global adoption.
• To Imperia, still slowly turning in the Konstanz harbor — you are an eight-hundred-year-old inside joke about the gap between the powerful and the righteous, and you are magnificent.
• To the Autobahn — we respect you. We also learned from you.
• And to Chuck: thank you for bringing us to the country that made you. For showing us the hamlet with your name. For refusing, all those years ago, to become someone else.
• Frohe Weihnachten. Die Suche geht weiter.

Merry Christmas. The search continues.

BELIEVE

​By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.