The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

The 13 ¹⁄₂ Lives of Captain Bluebear

Author	Walter Moers
Original title	Die 13½ Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär
Translator	John Brownjohn
Illustrator	Walter Moers
Cover artist	Walter Moers
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre	Fantasy novel
Publisher	Eichborn Verlag
Publication date	1999
Published in English	2000
Media type	Print (hardcover)
ISBN	(first hardcover edition)

The 13 ¹⁄₂ Lives of Captain Bluebear is a 1999 fantasy novel by German writer and cartoonist Walter Moers which details the numerous lives of a human-sized bear with blue fur. The captain's name is originally a pun in German, based upon the fact that the German words for "bears" (Bären) and "berries" (Beeren) sound very much alike, whereas Blaubeere (lit. "blueberry") is actually the German word for bilberry (a number of other German cartoonists have made similar puns relating to bear names in their stories, including Rötger Feldmann aka Brösel), that a typical sailorish sailor is called an (old) seabear, and that sailors are prejudiced to be quite often blue, i.e. drunk. The novel was originally written in German, an English translation was published in the United Kingdom in 2000 and in the United States in 2005, an Italian translation in 2000, a Chinese translation in 2002, and a French translation in 2005. The novel attained considerable popularity in Germany and the United Kingdom while experiencing relative obscurity in the United States.

The 13 ¹⁄₂ Lives of Captain Bluebear follow the adventures of the character Bluebear in the first half of his 27 lives (the joke being that a bluebear lives three times as long as a cat). The novel intersperses Bluebear’s narrative with excerpts from The Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs by Professor Abdullah Nightingale, who bacterially transmits it into Bluebear's brain.

The plot is set in the fictional continent of Zamonia (location of several other novels by Walter Moers) on Earth before the "great descent" in which Zamonia and many other continents sink beneath the waves. Many of the creatures encountered by Bluebear in the novel are taken from myths, folktales, prehistory, and Moers' imagination, among them Gryphons, Maenads, Trolls, Yetis, and Pterodactyls. Nearing the end of the novel, the mythical city of Atlantis disappears from Earth, an event witnessed by Bluebear.