Wulffmorgenthaler

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Wulffmorgenthaler

Author(s)	Mikael Wulff Anders Morgenthaler
Website	Wulffmorgenthaler RSS web feed
Current status / schedule	Daily
Genre(s)	weirdo-halløj ^[1]

Wulffmorgenthaler is a webcomic and newspaper comic strip created by Danish writer/artist duo Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler. The name of the strip is a portmanteau created from the pair's surnames. The name was also given to a satirical TV series, broadcast on the Danish channel DR2 in 2005.

1 Publication history
2 Style and content
3 Plagiarism
4 Television series
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] Publication history

Wulffmorgenthaler debuted in 2001 as a comic strip competition entry named Kalzone, completed few hours before the entry deadline. Submitted under the pseudonym "Pernille Richter Andersson", the strip won the competition, and a one month run in the national newspaper Politiken.^[2] The strip became a regular feature on DR's internet culture portal in 2002, and in October 2003 it became a regular daily newspaper strip in Politiken.^[3]

As a webcomic Wulffmorgenthaler, receives more than 15,000 visitors a day,^{[citation needed]} and the concept is developed as a series of animated short films for MTV Europe.

[edit] Style and content

The comic has a very distinct style, featuring shaky line drawings and coloring that appears to be computer-generated. Each installment is delivered a single frame, avoiding the more traditional format of boxed divisions to signify progress or movement in time. The characters and situations vary from strip to strip, but there are several recurring characters, such as the "Toucan Kid" (a grotesque hybrid of man and 28% toucan) and the so-called "Fucked-up Crazy-Ass Weirdo Beaver" (a seemingly innocent creature who consistently pulls off unimaginably weird feats). Also of note are the characters Dick Bird (a greasy-haired entrepreneur whose product for sale changes from strip to strip), Werner (the hapless yet happy antihero) and a voyeur who consistently informs his neighbour how arousing he finds his wife and daughter. Pandas are often shown as being violent beasts. The leader of the WWF has been shown to suffer humiliation from these animals on several occasions. The Dalai Lama is sometimes portrayed as being frustrated with his enlightened being by violently kicking Leonard Cohen fans. Recurring characters in Wulffmorgenthaler tend to be more of a running gag than a legitimate continuing narrative.

For a period, humans portrayed in the comic wore no clothes: according to the comic's website, Morgenthaler "was fed up with the tiresome meticulousness of drawing clothes on people so he just stopped doing it." Sometimes, when the situation called for a specific outfit to denote a specific role, humans would appear clothed. Lately characters have all started to appear fully clothed.

Content ranges from sideways political statements to complete non-sequitur, and relies on both intelligent humor and bathroom humor, as well as an abundance of blood, sexual references and grotesque imagery, to get its point across. Reading Wulffmorgenthaler is often an exercise of the imagination, as it has a habit of juxtaposing supremely ordinary characters in supremely unusual situations, or vice versa. "Punchlines" are delivered by way of dialogue or with one-liners written in a caption below the image. Because the comic is drawn in a non-serial format, delivery and timing are especially important (and difficult to maneuver), and as a result most of the humor in Wulffmorgenthaler relies on the quality of the writing itself rather than the element of surprise that usually lends itself to the traditional comic-strip punchline. No subject is taboo in the world of Wulffmorgenthaler, with recent topics including the Pope, illegitimate sex, and the consumption of aborted fetuses for dinner.

[edit] Plagiarism

The strip was for a period the focus of a debate concerning plagiarism, as the strip's followers voiced their concern over an advertising campaign by the Danish office of advertising agency DDB promoting the Volkswagen Golf GT, having appropriated its joke from a Wulffmorgenthaler strip.^[1] In a reversed issue, Wulffmorgenthaler was accused of plagiarising a photograph that had circulated on internet, to which Anders Morgenthaler conceded that the duo had been inspired by the image and based a strip on it in the belief that it was a privately forwarded photograph.^[4]

[edit] Television series

Wulffmorgenthaler was also broadcast as a television series, in the style of a parodised show for children in Denmark, in which Wulff, Morgenthaler and their pantomime friends Dolph, a fascist hippo and Margit, a politically correct female squirrel, introduce various short films. The only recurring character from the comic is the Toucan Kid. New characters include Ansgar and Loke, a very sexually active archeologist and his colleague who is deadly afraid of "the Vagina", the contestants on a fifties gameshow. Another recurring feature on the show was a "Reality show" starring a hapless school photographer, Bent, and his retarded assistant Bubber, the brothers Lefevre, who are carpetsalesmen trying to be actors, Asger Lesniak who has a personal vendetta against a guy who frequents the places he works, and Bimmer, a character obsessed with life in the tropic nether regions.

The TV-series evolved in the second season into Dolph og Wulff, in a documentary style, with The Fascist Hippo Dolph as the dominating main character.

The second season further evolved to a third season, this time in the style of a late night talkshow, on March 17 called Dolph og Wulff - med venner (Dolph and Wulff - with friends). The friends are a sex-crazed beaver named Rocco and an orangutang called "Finn". Rocco was actually created as a sex-crazed squirrel for the first season, but it was ultimately decided to not use him, so the Rocco puppet was used as Margit instead.