Hansrudi Wäscher

Hansrudi Wäscher was born on 5 April 1928 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and went on to become one of the most prolific figures in postwar German-language comics. He died on 7 January 2016 in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Working across nearly every craft role a comics page demands — artist, inker, colorist, letterer, and writer — Wäscher built a remarkable body of work spanning from 1953 onward and encompassing nearly 600 credited issues. He is best remembered for a cluster of long-running adventure series aimed at younger readers, most notably the science-fiction title *Nick der Weltraumfahrer* and its companion series *Nick*, alongside the Western titles *Buffalo Bill* and *Lasso*, and the medieval adventure strip *Sigurd*. These series gave him a devoted readership across West Germany and the broader German-speaking market during the heyday of small-format comic booklets in the 1950s and 1960s.

His draftsmanship was clean and energetic, well suited to action-driven genres, and his willingness to handle virtually all production duties himself gave his work a consistency that readers came to recognize immediately. Later in life he remained connected to the comics community, including through *Die Sprechblase*, a publication dedicated to German comics history and fandom. His output stands as a defining contribution to the vernacular adventure comics tradition of the German-speaking world.