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.

When I saw the above illustration from ‘The Magic Pencil’ by Dwight Sturgess (courtesy Stripper’s Guide), the scene below came to my mind immediately.

This strip is from Willy Vandersteen’s Suske en Wiske comic ‘De Briesende Bruid‘ (’The Roaving Bride’, 1968), in which Auntie Sidonia, an unmarried-but-hoping woman, finally gets a chance to find a mate. She travels through time to meet all kinds of legendary lovers, and in the end settles for a folk singer from her own time.

Which, to use Star Trek lingo, clashes with the Prime Directive of comics : “Nothing shall disturb the equilibrium”. In other words, the situation that the characters find themselves in after an adventure should be as similar as possible to the one they were in before it started. Now, how to end this story in a logical way (with Sidonia married) and still allow for new stories starting from the comic’s premisses (with Sidonia unmaried-but-hoping) ?

To solve this Gordian knot, Vandersteen used the same device that Sturgess used at the end of his comic : he draws himself simply erasing the story, and starting anew. An extra nice touch is the way Vandersteen explains himself to his readers (and, in turn, his characters) :

“I know Sidonia’s desires and after having her faithfully play her part in my stories for years and years, I simply had to make her very happy for once. But I really can’t miss her, and so nothing will come of this marriage. Tomorrow they will all be on paper again, and they will remember nothing of what happened here. Those are the benefits of the job !”

Ephemerist reader Kerstin Klein went to Amsterdam last month and made a sketch report about it. She also visited the Lambiek emporium (which every comics afficcionado should at least once in his life) and drew it as well, as you can see above.

I kinda like the way characters like Tom Poes or Lambiek (or even Gaston Lagaffe) are rendered by an artist who’s probably not familiar with them. It gives them a whole new dimension, somehow.

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)…

These days, the 296th Suske En Wiske comic book hits bookstores in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it’s called “The Magnificent Metamorphosis”. Which is strange, since the Suske En Wiske story that’s wrapping up in Flemish newspapers as we speak, is called “The Curious Noses”. So, what gives ?

The answer is marketing, my dears. For sixty years now, Suske en Wiske albums have looked the same : a bold red cover with a large illustation and the title in equally bold letters. Generations of readers learned how to read from these familiar albums. It’s become a mainstay in Flemish and Dutch households - I would even say it’s one of the most well-known and easily recognized brand images in the Low Countries. Show anybody a book that remotely looks like a Suske En Wiske album, and people will immediately associate it with Willy Vandersteen’s creations.

But let’s not forget we’re talking marketing here : focus groups, bar graphs, that sort of thing. It would seem that recent research showed that young readers prefer large imagery on the cover of their albums. And let’s face it, sixty years is kinda long, isn’t it ? So, the cover design for the books was changed, and a slip cover was added to smoothen the transition.

The new cover isn’t all new - there’ still an ample amount of red, and the logo has been left untouched. But beyond that, there’s not a lot setting this book apart from the slew of albums that crowd our bookstore’s comic book stands. I can easily imagine the nation’s grandma’s and grandpa’s wanting to buy a present for their grandchildren and aimlessly looking for that well known silhouette. Suske En Wiske’s sales, which are not that spectacular to begin with anymore, will no doubt be influenced by the change - but I’m not sure in which direction…

And that’s not all. Together with the classic look of the books, another monument of Flemish comics history has been chucked out. For years and years, the back of the books sported a complete list of published titles, along with an illustration of all the main characters, sitting on each other’s shoulders. This has become so familiar, that statuettes were produced of that image. But not anymore. These days we see a very ill-conceived illustration of all the characters hobbling along in their car, along with the four latest books and a condensed contents of the book. Again, this is marketing, and on the package of a product, you put the ingredients…

You would think that all this caused an uproar over here. After all, this is tantamount to changing Batman’s costume or killing of Superman… Er, no wait, I’m sure there are better examples. But no, nobody cared. After all, the book’s story stinks, as did the last 50 or so. So why bother - we still have a hundred-odd good stories, with their familiar red cover. Nobody’s taking them away from us..

Lambik, a very popular character from the very popular Flemish comic Suske En Wiske, (and inspiration for the name of one of Europe’s most famous comics stores) likes mussels, apparently.

In 1998 the Flemish daily De Standaard published a series of articles on the thoughts, ideas and perspectives of boys and girls in modern society. They asked Tom Cartoon to provide some eye-catching illustrations, and he did. He used the popular comic characters Suske And Wiske to illustrate that girls are getting stronger (left), and later that they still need to be better than boys to attain the same goals (right). The cool part is that Tom also referred to a well-known (well, over here at least) iconic use of these characters, namely in the illustration on the back of each album, as used here.