What is "punaniska"

Punaniska ( Finnish for " redneck") was a Finnish comic strip drawn by Harri "Wallu" Vaalio and written by Rauli "Rallu" Nordberg in the 1990s.

Punaniska was a comic about the American Wild West in the late 19th century, similar to the Belgian comic Lucky Luke, but even less serious. While Lucky Luke revisited factual events in Wild West history, Punaniska mostly had completely fictional stories, most of which were absurdly humorous.

Despite depicting a unilingually English culture, the comic was unilingually Finnish. A great deal of its humour depended on Finnish puns that were difficult, if not impossible, to translate into foreign languages. Still, one album was published in Germany in 1993.

The comic began in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, replacing an earlier Finnish comic strip called Taneli, a comic about a kindergarten-aged boy. It quickly rose in popularity and spawned fifteen comic book albums, which featured Punaniska comics drawn also by other Finnish artists (and some others, too, like Hunt Emerson from Birmingham, England), and articles about the American Wild West.

In 2003 it started again, now in a small Finnish golf magazine called "Gaddie-magazine". This new comic strip is called Viheriöiden Punaniska "Redneck on the Green" and here Punaniska plays the old Western style golf.