Wumo
| Wulffmorgenthaler | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Mikael Wulff Anders Morgenthaler |
| Website | http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com |
| Current status/schedule | Daily |
Wulffmorgenthaler is a webcomic created by Danish writer/artist duo Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler. The name of the comic is a kind of portmanteau created from the pair's surnames. The website claims that Wulffmorgenthaler is a daily publication, although sometimes there can be a few days' delay, in which case strips are uploaded retroactively.
History & creators
Wulffmorgenthaler got its start on the "design portal" k10k.net, and then quickly moved to its own website after garnering extensive positive attention and a great fan following. The comic has upwards of 1500 strips to date, and the website receives more than 15,000 visitors a day.
Mikael Wulff (b. 1972) is a comedian and writer. He performs live comedy and does television work in Scandinavia.
Anders Morgenthaler (b. 1972) is an illustrator, graphic designer and director of animation who also does live action filmmaking. He has completed several short films and music videos, and is currently making his debut animated feature film, Princess, produced at Zentropa, which is located in Avedøre, Denmark.
Style & 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 most recently a voyeur whose new neighbours wife and daughter are so hot that "he simply has to masturbate" which he tells his neighbour with a great degree of pride. 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 joke than a legitimate continuing narrative.
For quite a while, 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.
Wulffmorgenthaler also released a television series, in the style of a typical show for children in Denmark, where Wulff, Morgenthaler and their pantomime friends Dolph, a Fascist hippo and Margit, a politically correct female squirrel, introduce various short movies. 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 3rd season, this time in the style of a late night talkshow, on March 17th 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.