March 17th - Werner

A Year in Comics - March 17th

Werner

Rötger Werner Friedrich Wilhelm Feldmann, also known under his pen-name Brösel, was born in Lübeck-Travemunde on March 17th 1950.  After high-school he studied Litography at the Nordrepro company in Flensburg, after which he was drafted for service.  Returning to civilian life, he became a litographer at the Geisel company in Flensburg, but was fired after a year because he drew cartoons and comics while on the job - especially the caricatures of his bosses were not well-received at all.

Unemployed, Feldmann decided to make a job out of his hobby, and he became an underground comic artist, gaining recognition for his comic about the Bakuninis, a family of anarchists, caricaturising the left-radical scene of the 1970s.

Another hobby of Feldmann was tinkering with motorcycles - or rather, building quite some astonishing and not always street-legal machines, some entirely from scratch.  His encounters with both police and the vehicle inspection body, as well as his contacts with the Chopper community inspired him to start a comic series, called Werner.  Debuting in 1978, it soon reached a mainstream audience, and by 1990 the comics inspired a series of animated films.

Some of the machines used by Werner in the comic have actually been built by his author Brösel, like the Red Porsche Killer, a chopper with four coupled Horex engines; and the Dolmette, a chopper powered by 24 Dolmer chainsaw engines.

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95th entry of ?

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