An avid comic reader and artist from an early age, Mikael Ross only came to the Ninth Art in a somewhat detoured way. Born in Munich in 1984, he initially trained as a theatre tailor at the Bavarian State Opera. A move to Berlin and his studies at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee influenced his first longer story "Herrengedeck", which he self-published in 2008. During a year abroad at the Brussels School of Bande Dessinée, he meets the Belgian scenarist and illustrator Nicolas Wouters. They share a fascination for punk and subculture. Together they wrote and drew the graphic novel "Les pieds dans le béton" (2013), which immerses its two restless protagonists in the Berlin squatter scene of the 1980s. The book was published by avant-verlag in 2014 under the title "Lauter Leben!“. After two years of research in Neuerkerode, the cartoonist dares a change of perspective with his graphic novel "Der Umfall" (2018), and tells of the low blows and high flights of a young man with a mental disability from Noel's point of view. For this, he received the Max und Moritz Award for the "Best German-language Comic" in 2020. For the Beethoven Year 2020, Ross created "Goldjunge", an entertaining and authentic biography that portrays the youthful years of the genius of classical music.