Manfred Schmidt born April 15, 1913 in Bad Harzburg; died July 28, 1999 in Ambach am Starnberger See) is a comic strip artist and humorist.
Manfred Schmidt grew up in Bremen. At the age of 14, his first comics were published in the Bremen news and the Weser newspaper. At the same age, he played saxophone and banjo in the jazz group Les Huit.
In 1931 he graduated from the Neue Gymnasium and decided to become active in the film industry, but found it not very successful. He studied at the State School of Applied Arts in Bremen and then worked for the Ullstein Verlag as a press artist. In 1933 he moved to Berlin to become a director, but only received a job as a camera apprentice.
At the start of World War II, he designed the company Deutsche zeechenfilm GmbH, which was controlled by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda. With the job he tried to escape the editorial staff of the Wehrmacht, because the film company was of great importance to the Nazi regime.
In 1942, he was finally drafted into military service and worked as a military cartographer. He was never used on the front, but he was a member of a Waffen-SS or Wehrmacht propaganda company. Towards the end of the war he again shot jokes for the army newspaper Panzer Voran and for propaganda floats, with which the morale of the American troops landed in was to be undermined.
In the post-war period he was first employed in the editorial office of the pacifist magazine Pinguin, published by Rowohlt and edited by Erich Kostner. After Schmidt encountered Superman comics, he decided to produce a parody of this narrative form that he perceived as primitive and boring: Nick Knatterton, a detective story in comic format, was created for Quick magazine from from 1950.
As a model for the detective, he served Hans Albers' incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Another important source of inspiration is the new hero Nat Pinkerton of the 1920s, whose novels Schmidt consumed in his youth. However, a first variant appeared in 1935 in the newspaper Die gr'ne Post under the title The Call for Help of the Maud O'Key. In the crime story, a detective named Nick Knatterton acted with cunning and skill. As a result, the humorous man's statements about Superman and Hans-Albers will be more like a funny transfiguration. Nick Knatterton was very successful and filmed in Schmidt's animated film studio. National success made him rich, so he acquired a yacht which he named "Knatterton".
The demands of weekly serial production, however, increasingly overburdened him, so that he wanted to die or marry Knatterton in the stories in 1959, but shouting among readers prevented this once and then . The ongoing mental burden leading to writer's block, which a psychiatrist has also been unable to resolve. Schmidt eventually finished the Knatterton series and then worked as a travel reporter for the Quick.
From 1957 to 1961, he also wrote the column The Very Open Letter with his friend and colleague Loriot for magazines.
Schmidt was politically suspended on the left; he described himself as an "Edelkommunisten" and saw a counter-model for West Germany in the GDR.
In the 1960s, Schmidt also worked as a comics critic and wrote several books on the subject. He created more comedy series and animated films with an ironic tone for German television. He also wrote radio plays, designed advertisements and wrote several travel books.
Schmidt's comic strips and travel reports are always humorous and characterized by a cheerful, sometimes ironic naivety.