Werner (comics)

Werner is a fictional character, appearing in a number of German comic books and animated films. He was created in 1978 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, 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.

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 . 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.

The character of Werner is based on Brösel's and his brother Andi's experiences. Werner's life is that of an unemployed biker that consists of souping up his motorcycle and consuming large amounts of beer (known as Bölkstoff in the comics). Both regularly gets him in trouble with the police and the German vehicle safety agency TÜV who due to their expressed incompetency and imbecility are usually ignored and duped by Werner. In the movies, Werner is voiced by Northern German band Torfrock's singer Klaus Büchner (whereas Torfrock also wrote part of the original soundtrack of the first movie, and partly did for the sequels as well).

In his younger years, Werner was apprentice to plumber Meister Walter Röhrich – the situations and characters in these stories are based on Brösel's brother Andi's apprenticeship years. In the movies, Röhrich is voiced by Andi, based upon the parodies he had done of his plumber Meister in real life ever since his apprenticeship.

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