Tobias Seicherl is the title character of a

comic a Media (communication), medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of Panel (comics), panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, Glo ...

drawn by

Viennese Viennese may refer to: * Vienna, the capital of Austria * Viennese people, List of people from Vienna * Viennese German, the German dialect spoken in Vienna * Music of Vienna, musical styles in the city * Viennese Waltz, genre of ballroom dance * V ...

caricaturist A caricaturist is an artist who specializes in drawing caricatures. List of caricaturists * Abed Abdi (born 1942) * Al Hirschfeld (1903–2003) * Alex Gard (1900–1948) * Alexander Saroukhan (1898–1977) * Alfred Grévin (1827–1892) * Alf ...

Ladislaus Kmoch (alias Ludwig Kmoch, 1897–1971), a self-taught

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

. The comic appeared as a

daily strip A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays. Bud Fisher's ''Mutt and Jeff'' is commonly regarded as the first daily c ...

in the

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

n tabloid 'Das Kleine Blatt' published by Vorwärts-Verlag from October 5, 1930. Tobias Seicherl can be regarded as the first continental

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

an daily comic strip. The comic strip has been written in

and was one of the first European comics featuring balloons.Ludwig Kmoch (lambiek.net)
/ref> ‘Seicherl’ has two meanings in Viennese, which are semantically connected. The original meaning of ‘small sieve’ later gave rise to the second meaning of '

weakling Weakling was an American black metal band from San Francisco. The band never toured and released only one album, ''Dead as Dreams'', recorded in 1998 and released on Tumult Records in 2000. History The name Weakling, according to founding member ...

'; someone who lacks

moral character Moral character or character (derived from charaktêr) is an analysis of an individual's steady moral qualities. The concept of ''character'' can express a variety of attributes, including the presence or lack of virtues such as empathy, coura ...

- letting everything ‘sieve straight through’ them.

Main characters

Tobias Seicherl, a typical petit bourgeois, was drunk on many occasions and often took to strolling through the streets of Vienna with his walking stick, pipe and dog named Struppi. It's somewhat ironic that the dog was the voice of reason in this strip. Little was known or discussed about Seicherl’s career or his living conditions, which made him the ideal person with which social-democratic readers could identify themselves, helping to vent their frustrations toward the

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...

of the time.

History

Between 1930 and 1939, the comic was published on a daily basis in ‘Das Kleine Blatt’, although sporadically so into the first part of 1940. The series was politically orientated between the years 1930–1934, in which Tobias Seicherl was seen to sympathize with

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

. However, from 1934 onwards, with the introduction of the Austro-fascist dictatorship, Seicherl inevitably became unpolitical. By the end of the 1930s the strip displayed some nationalistic tendencies. Tobias Seicherl was so popular that special edition volumes have been published as early as 1933. After the closing days of

WWII World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

attempts were made to revive the comic strip. From 1958 to 1961, the Seicherl series appeared in a variety of different Viennese newspapers yet was unable to once again achieve the high point of its earlier success.

Sources

* Most of the material in this article is from the Bavarian Wikipedia article ''Tobias Seicherl''

Main characters

History

Sources

References

Further reading