Gerhard Seyfried (born March 15, 1948)[1] is a German comic artist, cartoonist, and writer. One of the most popular German underground artists, he won the Max & Moritz Prize in 1990.[1]
With Flucht aus Berlin (1989/90) he changed his drawing style and switched from the "scurrying line that curls around the tiniest little things" (F. W. Bernstein)[2] to ligne claire. In the meantime, he uses the computer to color his figures: "I draw with pencil, then trace it with ink, but no longer color by hand.[3] That's too expensive and too toxic." His colleague Ziska judged, "He's very precise and an incredibly good technician."[4] When he works alone on a new comic book, he does without a "storyboard," i.e., a visualized scene book, and relies entirely on his spontaneous intuition.[5] Only in the case of the comic albums that were created together with Ziska was a storyboard developed jointly.[6]
When writing his historical novels, on the other hand, he first reconstructs the "framework of historical events."[7] To do this, however, he does not limit himself to the historical-scientific secondary literature, but researches archives for original documents and primary sources. Old photographs are also helpful to him, since he can "glean a vast amount of stuff from them."[8] Only at the end of the research does he connect the context of the events with fictional characters, who act primarily as observers.[9]