While promoting his new book, Shady (his first one in eight years), Flemish painter and cartoonist Brecht Vandenbroucke also noted that in the past year he did a job for Variety Magazine, illustrating an article on the effect of the Covid crisis on film crews.
The piece very cleverly combines the real with the virtual, contrasting film making tools, like cameras and microphones, with the ever-present green screen of current cinema. As if we were all too preoccupied with little details that we didn’t see the larger danger looming.
Vandenbroucke’s new book collects his Shady Bitch stories, short comics about a chaotic and not very endearing character with a full beard and a skirt (he’s been described as the love child of Popeye and Olive Oyl) who bumps his way around a world full of pop culture and contemporary angsts. If you love Cowboy Henk, or Pieter De Poortere’s Dickie, and you know a word of two of Dutch, here’s a comic for you. Or, as we used to say in the times of the Forbidden Planet blog, “translation, please!”…
