Rautie was born as Michael Rautenberg on 14th of February 1968 in the City of Hanau (Germany). He lives with his two sons Anton, Valentin and his wife, the goldsmith Anita, still in Hanau and he is well known there. After early experiences with different self-published fanzines, one day he produced the Hanau city-magazine called "Banane". Outgoing from this non-periodical paper, there was developed the legendary happy community "Kix Multimedia" publishing a clever made, small formatted magazine "Kix". It was established by some comic-artists and a few members of a few bands. Kix Multimedia shaped out and celebrated a very special kind of dilletante stickman culture, consisting of absurd, broad humor which is copied with pleasure by a lot of other artists until today. Today, Rautie mainly works as a comic artist, drawer and illustrator. But he is also a very demanded disc jockey, well known as the Freak of Vinyl only (FoVo).

The comic strip "Willy the Kid", he developed in coordination with his friend Raul (Words), an old buddy from the days of Kix Multimedia. The well known strip is already published since many years. It is also pulished in the Bremen university-diary for several yearly periods.

The first comic album of Rautie, "Heinz und Pifie: Nanu Ragout aus Dosen" (ISBN 3-935146-11-6) was published in year 2000 from the Bremen Edition Panel.  Barely unpacked, for this album Rautie gets the award of the Erlangen Comic-Salon for the "Best independent comic in year 2000". Heree are the words, spoken in the laudatio 2000: "The album convinced like the whole work of Rautie with a clearness of drawed lines, and the perfect harmony of words and pictures. Substantially the work conviced impressive with a big poetic beauty, and such an emotional depth you can find just rarely in the comic scene." In this album a story is told, of a rising friendship and a journey to the moon while searching for the last living penguin.

Going through all these years full of productivity, you can't devide Rautie and the city of Hanau anymore. Everywhere you go downtown, you cannot avoid to meet the typical stickmans of Rautie. They are on buttons, shirts, bags. The lot of printed stuff of the several municipal organisations in flyers and displays and so on. The very specific lines of Rautie you cannot confuse with any other. You find this portion of love in every picture. Love, which somehow is transferred to the heart of every beholder if he doesn' t own a heart of strone. Funny, particulary women, traditional not very sincered by comic strips, are surpricing influenced by the charme of Rautie's pictures. If you now try to find an expression for describing his special style, you are forced to picture out a new expression. An expression which was luckily found by the journalist Juergen Dick: "Urban Art Comic". We can' t describe it in better words.

Picture: Anne Berger