Walter Moers (born 24 May 1957 in Mönchengladbach, Germany) is a German comic creator and novelist, and a regular contributor to the satire magazine Titanic.
His most famous character in Germany is probably Käpt'n Blaubär, whose franchise include puppet show sketches in children's TV, newspaper comics and a full length animated movie.
Most of his comics feature the eponymous brat Das kleine Arschloch (The Little Asshole). There are also two animated movies.
Most of his novels take place on the fictional continent of Zamonia.
Works of Walter Moers that have been translated into English:
Comic books
- The Little Asshole (8 volumes)
Zamonia novels
- The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear
- Ensel Und Krete (not translated)
- Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures
- The City of Dreaming Books
- The Alchemaster's Apprentice
- The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books (sequel to The City of Dreaming Books)
Non-Zamonia novels
- A Wild Ride Through the Night
Notable tropes in the works of Walter Moers:
- Absent-Minded Professor: Professor Schimauski
- Adolf Hitlarious: Adolf, die Nazi-Sau is about Adolf Hitler having survived in the sewers of Berlin, reemerging in The '90s and utterly (and hilariously) failing to adjust to modern life.
- Aliens Made Them Do It: Grey students force a captured Hitler to have sex with allegedly recently deceased Mother Teresa to conceive a kind of super-human.
- Ass Shove: Pelping, which involves a longish, thin animal (fish, eel).
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In one story, nuclear tests in Antarctica create a Godzilla-like penguin who surfs on an ice float to East Germany and starts to wreak havoc.
- Calling a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The Zamonian festivity Hamouli-Mepp is suspiciously similar to X-mas. (Of course it is - the respective book is a big Take That! against X-mas.)
- Conlang: Pimperanto ("pimpern" means "to shag"). It's got bits and pieces from other languages, it's the only language in the world that knows three "i"s in a row, and its four most important words are:
- "Hoogla" (yes, no, me, you, now, later, please, thank you, good, bad, breasts, weltschmerz, identity crisis, pedestrian area etc.)
- "Boogla" (compulsory helmet wearing, penis envy and always the opposite of "hoogla")
- "Yoogla" (a description of a state, roughly referring to emptiness in men's case and filledness in women's case)
- "Zoogla" (a super-term that can mean anything and everything — except for what "hoogla", "boogla" and "yoogla" mean)
"Tu hoogla beautifullo as Frans Kawka!" ("You are more beautiful than Franz Kafka!")"Youra sausagi es multo bifteckiii!" ("Your sausage is very meaty!")"In Jordaniii no has hoogla!" ("In Jordan, there are no pedestrian areas!") - Direct Line to the Author: The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear and The City of Dreaming Books were described as parts of the autobiography of their respective narrators, The Alchemaster's Apprentice a Zamonian fairy tale; Walter Moers merely translated.
- Excessive Mourning: The mourning of Princess Diana (accidentally killed by her driver Adolf Hitler) in Adolf parodies that in Real Life.
"Oh, by the way, Mother Teresa is dead, too, but who cares..."
- Facial Profiling: Jewish hook noses in Adolf, die Nazi-Sau.
- While Walter Moers already has Prince and Adolf Hitler as visitors, Michael Jackson comes to visit him, too. He has undergone nose surgery again, and now he has a Jewish-ish hook nose as a symbol for all the races in the world. Again: Hitler is in Moers' bathroom at this point.
- Hitler takes the TV cook Alfred Biolek in whose show he appears as a publicity stunt for a Jew due to his nose and attacks him with a wooden spoon.
- Footnote Fever: In the Zamonia novels Moers loves to make footnotes which content pseudo dictionary entries.
- Funetik Aksent: Everything Adolf Hitler says in the Adolf series.
- Fun with Foreign Languages: "Fötzelek" reads like "cunt licking" to a German-speaker, especially when pronounced the way a German would. While in reality it's a Hungarian vegetable stew or soup, in Pimperanto, it means what it looks like in German.
- Gag Penis: Implied by the Little Asshole during a presentation in school in which he claims that the erect male penis is 60cm (24") long and weighs 3kg (6.6lbs), demonstrating both with a tape measure and a weight.
- German Humor
- The Greys: Alien students who abduct Adolf Hitler to create a new, superior human race with him as the father and the recently deceased Mother Teresa as the mother.
- Groin Attack: In the book Aha! (and as seen on its cover), a girl shows a boy her private parts. Now she wants to see his. Once he gets his scrotum out, he calls it his "nuts". The girl grabs them with her hand, squeezes them and wonders, "Soft nuts?"
- He Also Did: Moers' works are peculiarly diverse in that he has been writing/drawing for three quite different audience demographics: Comicbooks for adults, TV for children, and the Zamonia novels for young adults. Fans of the Zamonia novels often know little about his comicbooks, or are even blissfully unaware of their existence. It's probably better for them.
- They include "The Little Asshole", which is about a little boy and based entirely on Refuge in Audacity and
Crosses the Line Twice, and "Adolf" which isn't that more harmless.
- They include "The Little Asshole", which is about a little boy and based entirely on Refuge in Audacity and
- Jacob Marley Apparel: This gets deconstructed to its perverted end. In the story in question, God himself decided that the angels (former humans) he uses as messengers are this. So we meet an angel in a crotch-free black rubber suit and another one who's completely naked with a carrot shoved up his... yeah. But OTOH, this God still accepts perverts, even if he may act jerky towards them.
- May–December Romance: Gender-flipped and taken to a more extreme extreme than Harold and Maude by the Little Asshole who, despite being underage even for German standards, tries to get it on with the geezer Inge Koschmidder.
- Mind Screw: His Author Avatar in the Zamonia novels is a satire of the modern literature scene and uses Author Tracts as actual Author Tracts by Moers that criticise among other things... Author Tracts.
- Moment Killer: The mother of a male teenager in one story. "Are you screwing already?"
- Old Friend, New Gender: "Hermine" is in fact Hermann Göring for whom the CIA had paid a gender change. Now he can finally have sex with Hitler (while both sing the "Ride of the Valkyries").
- Potty Failure: A boy and a girl play "pee-pee". Another boy comes, wants to play along with them, tries to pee, but he tries so hard that he craps his pants instead and suggests to play "poo-poo" instead.
- R-Rated Opening: On the cover of Aha!, there is a little girl who holds up her skirt with her panties down to show a boy her private parts. The book title is the boy's reaction.
- Shout-Out
- After his alien encounter, Adolf grows to enormous size and accidentally destroys Toyko.
- Sink The Life Boats: In one story about an opium-addicted captain who has made a plan to escape with the female passengers to an uncharted island.
- Smurfing: In a loose sense. Imagine a closed time loop that repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and...OK, and that's why the respective comic calls it a "Time Smurf" by analogy.
- Super Zeroes: Once made a lot of one-panel-gags involving those. Giving the world "heroes" (and villains) like Heart Attack Man (since we see him in a hospital bed, he doesn't *give* them), Dyslexic Man, Captain Insensitive who keeps his hat on in the cinema, the very popular Round-for-the-House-Man, tiny Captain Liechtenstein and others.
- Surprise Party: One short story starts with a German "white trash" guy watching TV. Then, someone rings his door, and when he opens, a hoard of penguins enters, starts a party. When he demands to know what this is all about, they show him that today's "international penguin's day". He's happy with that and joins the party.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Adolf, die Nazi-Sau.
- Adolf Hitler + somewhat buggy time machine = Hilarity Ensues. Did you know the bastard is responsible not only for WW2 and genocide, but also the deaths of Princess Diana and Kurt Cobain? (OK, it was a tragic accident.)
- Threatening Shark: One story about a guy with a phobia for sharks. It starts with the fact that he'd never enter water deeper than a foot... not even a puddle... or a bathtub... and then gets really weird, when he claims there are miniature sharks causing diseases and (shark-themed) madness... and then, the shark police takes him away (did they?)
- Vomit Discretion Shot: According to Adolf, die Nazi-Sau, Prince (who goes by his symbol rather than by the name Prince) apparently keeps visiting Walter Moers, drinking too much Chantré, complaining about music and then hurling into Moers' loo every now and then. All we see of the latter is a speech bubble.
- What Could Have Been: "Deadman, the dead comic hero". Once already listed at Amazon to be in the works. The exact reasons it wasn't made are unknown...
- You Need to Get Laid: When asked by his psychiatrist, Adolf cannot remember the last time when he had sex. Therefore, his psychiatrist gives him a prescription for a fuck. Cue Old Friend, New Gender.
