The Ephemerist

Here’s another of Pieter De Poortere’s great bird’s eye view illustrations that I blogged about earlier. This one was published on the cover of Focus Knack, to announce a lenghty article about the current state of Flemish cartoon and comics, which quotes Top Shelf’s Brett Warnock with an enthousiastic laudatio to the Flemish comic :

“Your flemish artists at least have a really unique and fantastic vision. Far to many Americans create comics full of talking heads, whereas Flemish, and also a lot of French authors dare to explore wild and boisterous ideas in brave artistic styles. I only whish American authors took them as an example.” (This, btw, is very weird, as I had to translate this from a Dutch translation of an English text - I only wonder how much I changed in it).

The article also contains profiles of six hot Flemish talents (Pieter De Poortere, Conz, Olivier Schrauwen, Judith Vanistendael, Brecht Evens and Simon Spruyt) and announces the great Belgian Cartoon Clash, a contest for new, undiscovered cartoonists who get a chance at winning 52 pages in Focus. More about that, along with an overview of the participants, here (in Dutch)…

For the fifth year Patrick Janssens, mayor of Antwerp, is holding an open-air party for the people of his city, to keep contact with his constituents and keep him on their minds as well, I guess. This year, though, there’s also a kids-only party, with adults not allowed. I’m wondering how he’ll get through the doors himself at that occasion…

Anyway, I guess what’s most interesting for us, is that flemish illustrator Jan vander Veken has done two magnificent posters for the events. And they’re here for you to enjoy.

(thanks, Frank)