Manfred Schmidt (born April 15, 1913 in Bad Harzburg; died July 28, 1999 in Ambach am Starnberger See) was a comic strip artist and humorist.
Manfred Schmidt grew up in Bremen. At the age of 14, his first comic strips were published in the Bremen News and the Weser newspaper. At the same age, he played saxophone and banjo in the jazz band Les Huit.
In 1931 he graduated from the Neue Gymnasium and decided to become active in the film industry, but found this to be unfruitful. 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 film director, but only received a job as an apprentice cameraman.
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At the beginning of the Second World War, he designed the company Deutsche Zeechenfilm GmbH, which was controlled by the Reich Propaganda Ministry. With the job, he tried to escape the drafting of the Wehrmacht, because the film company was of great importance to the Nazi regime.
In 1942 he was finally drafted into his military service and worked as a military cartographer. He was never used on the front, but he was a member of a propaganda company of the Waffen-SS or the Wehrmacht. Towards the end of the war he again drew jokes for the army newspaper Panzer Voran and for the 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 the Superman comics, he decided to produce a parody of this narrative form, which he perceived as primitive and boring: Nick Knatterton, a detective story in comic format, was created for the magazine Quick from 1950.
As a model for the detective, he served the incarnation of Sherlock Holmes by Hans Albers. 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 appears as early as 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. Accordingly, the statements of Superman and Hans-Albers by the humorous man will rather be like a funny transfiguration. Nick Knatterton was very successful and filmed in Schmidt's animated film studio. The national success made him rich, so he acquired a yacht which he named "Knatterton".
The demands of the weekly serial production, however, increasingly overloaded him, so that he wanted to die or marry Knatterton in the stories in 1959, but the cries among the readers prevented him once and then. The continuous mental burden leading to a writer's block, which also was not able to solve a psychiatrist. Schmidt finally finished the Knatterton series and then worked as a travel journalist for the Quick.
From 1957 to 1961, he also wrote the column La lettre très ouverte with his friend and colleague Loriot for magazines.
Schmidt was politically left-wing; 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 comic book critic and wrote several books on the subject. He created more comic series and animated films with an ironic tone for German television. He also wrote radio plays, designed commercials and wrote several travel books.
