Werner (comics)

Cover of the first Werner comic book, Oder was? (2000s re-publication cover art). Art by Rötger Feldmann.

Werner is a German comics character, appearing in a number of German comic books and animated films. He was created in 1978[1] by Brösel (Rötger Feldmann). Werner is the most successful German comic character of all time with over 10 million books sold and over 13 million film admissions. At almost 5 million admissions in Germany,[2] the first movie, Werner – Beinhart! (1990), is Germany's third most commercially successful film of the 1990s on the German domestic market, and #14 of Germany's most successful domestic market films of all time.[3]

Prior to Oder Was?, the first standalone Werner book published in 1981, since the late 1970s the Werner comics appeared in the German satirical magazine Pardon. Indeed, Oder was? was but a collection of the Werner comics that had been published in Pardon by then.

The Werner books are known for their anarchic humour, often based on Northern German dialects and puns. Standard High German is rarely spoken in the books, when it is used it is usually to portray the speaker as overtly formal and square, whereas most characters employ accents and dialects placed in a lingual continuum between the common modern Northern pronunciation of High German.

  1. ^ "Brösel". lambiek.net.
  2. ^ "Werner - Beinhart!". November 29, 1990 – via www.imdb.com.
  3. ^ See Liste erfolgreicher Filme nach Einspielergebnis und Besucherzahlen, section Die erfolgreichsten deutschen Filme (List of biggest box office hits in Germany, section German box office hits), on German Wikipedia