Gerhard Seyfried (born March 15, 1948)^[1] is a German comic artist, cartoonist, and writer. One of the most popular German underground artists, he won the Max & Moritz Prize in 1990.^[1]

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With Flucht aus Berlin (1989/90) he changed his drawing style and switched from the "scurrying line that curls around the tiniest little things" (F.W. Bernstein)^[2] to ligne claire. In the meantime, he uses the computer to color his figures: "I draw with pencil, then trace it with ink, but no longer color by hand.^[3] That's too expensive and too toxic." His colleague Ziska judged, "He's very precise and an incredibly good technician."^[4] When he works alone on a new comic book, he does without a "storyboard," i.e., a visualized scene book, and relies entirely on his spontaneous intuition.^[5] Only in the case of the comic albums that were created together with Ziska was a storyboard developed jointly.^[6]

When writing his historical novels, on the other hand, he first reconstructs the "framework of historical events."^[7] To do this, however, he does not limit himself to the historical-scientific secondary literature, but researches archives for original documents and primary sources. Old photographs are also helpful to him, since he can "glean a vast amount of stuff from them."^[8] Only at the end of the research does he connect the context of the events with fictional characters, who act primarily as observers.^[9]