Baby Bruno & Honk, the Bommels, Mrs.Hoppmann, the Suicide Victim, and the Death

A story straight out of a comic book: „During my studies, I always walked around with my portfolio under my arm, knocking on the doors of every agency and publisher to offer my work—even at Rüssl Musikverlag. As so often happened, I was told, ‚We’ll get back to you!‘ But then Otto Waalkes himself actually called me: ‚Can you make animated films with the Ottifants?‘ I couldn’t do that yet, but I was pretty good at comics. I convinced him of the idea to create Ottifant comic strips inspired by the Peanuts. To do this, I wanted to put Otto’s four-legged Ottifants on two legs and create recognizable characters.

No sooner said than done; in the summer of 1986, Gunter Baars and I retreated to a mountain cabin in the Swiss region of Ticino, where we wrote and illustrated the first monthly installment. We coordinated everything with Otto, who was in Miami, via fax from the village post office. Once everything was approved, we returned to Hamburg, hit the phones, and sold the series to over 70 daily newspapers! Since then, we’ve produced Germany’s longest-running newspaper comic strip series up until 2022, created a season of Ottifants for RTL, and developed and written the feature film Kommando Störtebeker.“