author
Wilhelm Busch
1832–1908
Best known for Max and Moritz, he helped shape the modern comic strip with mischievous picture stories and sharp, playful verse. His work mixes humor and satire in a way that still feels lively more than a century later.
2 Audiobooks
Pater Filucius
by Wilhelm Busch
Schein und Sein: Nachgelassene Gedichte
by Wilhelm Busch
About the author
Wilhelm Busch was a German poet, draftsman, and painter born in Wiedensahl in 1832 and dead in Mechtshausen in 1908. He studied art in Düsseldorf, Antwerp, and Munich, but became especially famous for illustrated stories that paired lively drawings with rhyming, satirical text.
His best-known work is Max and Moritz (1865), a hugely influential tale of two pranksters. Busch also wrote and drew other popular picture stories, and his Bilderbogen are often described as forerunners of the comic strip because of the way they combine sequential images with witty narration.
Alongside his comic and satirical writing, he also painted, with influences from Dutch masters often noted in accounts of his work. What keeps him memorable is the blend of visual storytelling, mischievous humor, and a surprisingly modern sense of timing that links 19th-century satire to the comics that followed.