From 1985 until 2006, readers of the monthly Stuttgart magazine Live (and after 1991, its successor Lift) were accustomed to seeing in every issue a full-page comic by Peter Puck. Puck’s creation, Rudi, quickly became popular because it combined a sophisticated and humorous artistic style and brilliant comic timing with pointed and witty dialogue that sometimes threatened to crowd the drawings out of their panels. Rudi is the episodic story of a former punk who has matured into a perpetual outsider, sarcastic and cynical, but frustrated by the fact that his contempt for his middle-class roots never enables him to transcend them. In his ongoing quest to achieve success, or at least sex, with as little effort as possible, Rudi is aided by his best friend Fred, who sails happily through life with no ambition whatsoever. What sets Rudi apart from the mere situation comedy that such a setup could easily led to is Puck’s complex juggling not only of text and picture, but also of a huge number of apparently irreconcilable influences: the underground sensibility of Robert Crumb, the visual style of André Franquin or Albert Uderzo, and Puck’s own academic background in cultural studies and modern literature. The icing on the cake, however, is the fact that Rudi is also a funny animal strip: Rudi himself is apparently some kind of skinny rat; Fred is clearly canine, if not vulpine; and the city they live in is populated with “dogfaces” similar to the inhabitants of Carl Barks’s Duckburg—though Rudi’s adventures are decidedly not aimed at children. Puck’s synthesis of these influences into a satirical depiction of German urban society at the end of the 20th century have produced what journalist Andreas Platthaus has called “a work that stands like a monolith in the German comics world.” As the fourth volume of collected Rudi comics proclaims in its title: There’s no one like Rudi.