The Ephemerist

Flemish cartoonist Steven De Rie created this poster for the 20th edition of the Wilrijk Comics Festival. Try and find all references to characters and comics-related news items.

As we speak, Belgium has been without a government for more than 150 days. The fact that most of my countrymen don’t really seem to care (except for the fact that prices are starting to rise noticeably) is probably the most pathetic aspect of this drama.

Anyway, let’s not forget that we have been longer without Nero in our newspapers, and that self-same Nero celebrated his 60the anniversary last month (Nero, by the way, who is probably the only newspaper strip character actually having a plaque next to his door saying “newspaper strip character”).

Which prompted our King to ask him for help. And so it happened, as presented by cartoonist chameleon Dirk Stallaert in a special issue of De Standaard…

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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)…

This is a very nice stamp, published by the Belgian Post office in honor of Marc Sleen at the occasion of his retirement. Sleen had been drawing his newspaper comic Nero for more than half a century, and is widely regarded as one of the grand old men of the Flemish comic. Incidentally, he’s also mentioned in the Guinness Book Of World Records for single-handedly drawing the longest-running newspaper strip (even though the Guinness web site doesn’t mention this).