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Belgian Comic Strip - the best of the 9th Art

Brussels & Wallonia: A Destination Full of Characters

Brussels, the Capital of European Comic Strip & Wallonia,birthplace of fanciful Comic strip

While most people around the worldassociate comics and cartoons with Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, the Peanuts strip of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, the irrepressible Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes, and superheroes like Batman, Superman and Spiderman, in Europe there is a whole different appreciation of La Bande Dessinée - “the comic strip”. And the undisputed capital of this far more surreal, absurd and often political medium is the city of Brussels.

While everyone knows the most famous Belgian creation, Hergé’s intrepid reporter Tintin, there is a whole universe of weird and wonderful characters waiting to be discovered for those who make a pilgrimage to Brussels - the laconic cowboy Lucky Luke and his dastardly enemies, the Dalton brothers, a strange, bouncing imaginary animal, the Marsupilami, the cheerful Smurfs - known here as “Les Schtroumpfs” - and those “très British” detectives, Blake and Mortimer.

The city boasts its own Comic Strip Museum,(http://www.cbbd.be) housed in a splendid building designed by the master Art Nouveau architect, Victor Horta, and all over Brussels you can follow the Comic Strip Trail passes 20 giant wall murals depicting famous BD characters - the term “bande dessinée” is always shortened to BD and pronounced “bay day”. And there are a host of specialised bookshops that are a goldmine for both collectible vintage BD books and magazines, and cutting-edge political and social BD’s that lampoon the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy and George Bush, and address sensitive issues such as global warming, racism and terrorism. So it is no surprise that the city that gave the world the wonderful surreal paintings of Rene Magritte, has also rather grandly christened the work of humble comic strip creators, “The Ninth Art”.

On the Brussels comic strip trail:

To discover Brussels’ special world of Bande Dessinée, the best starting point is a tour round the Comic Strip Museum, or to give it the official name “Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art” (Rue des Sables 20, tel: 02 219 1980,www.brusselsbdtour.com, open Tue-Sun 10.00am-6.00pm, adults 7.50; children under 12 3). Everywhere you look there are fun statues of comic heroes, a battered Citroen car, a copy of Tintin’s “rocket to the moon”. There is an excellent educational gallery which explains the A-to- Z of how a comic strip is conceptualised by artist and scriptwriter, roughed out in black and white sketches, laid out in strips by graphic designers, coloured in by painters using everything from water colours to felt tip pens or even the sharpened end of burnt matches. Another gallery represents the history of the comic strip - from humble beginnings in America at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was created as a novelty sales tool by Sunday newspapers to get readers to buy next week’s edition to follow “the gripping adventures of........”, to the launching in Belgium in the 1920’s and 30’s of cult weekly journals dedicated solely to the Ninth Art - Spirou, Tintin Magazine, Pilote, through till the boom times of today, when Brussels probably boasts the largest proportion of professional comic artists in the world.

There is of course a whole section of the museum dedicated to Tintin, where you can witness both the changes over the years in Hergé’s drawings of his characters and the increasing sophistication of his subject matter, such as “Tintin and the Picaros” or “Tintin in Tibet”. Although the original drawings for comic strips were often crumpled up and thrown in the waste basket when everything was ready to be printed, the Centre has built up a comprehensive collection of over 7,000 original drawings. And as these are fragile and cannot be exposed to daylight for too long, the Espace Saint Roch is used as an ever-changing gallery for these original illustrations.

The Comic Strip Trail is just as fun for adults as for kids, and everyone will discover their own favourite. You can track them down on your own - a great way of discovering the backstreets of Brussels – or organise a guide from the Comic Strip Centre. Certain murals just have to be seen though. Don’t miss an action scene of a bank hold-up from Lucky Luke (Rue de la Buanderie), while Cubitus (Rue de Flandre) is a mischievous white dog, who forces the Mannekin Pis statue off his pedestal, and stands there having a pee himself! By the Jeu de Balle market, on Rue des Capucins, there is one mural of two little-known Hergé characters, Quick & Flupke, and a second featuring two 1930’s politically incorrect heroes, Blondin and Cirage, one of whom is a rather caricatured “Negro”.

While the Aladdin’s Cave bookshop of the Comic Strip Centre seems to stock every BD imaginable, there are a host of specialised “librairies” dotted around town. The one not to be missed is the funky Brusel (Boulevard Anspachlan 100, www.brusel.com), part bookshop, part gallery of original comic strips, which has weekly signings by BD authors from around the world, including Tony Sandoval from Mexico. Just nearby are two excellent second-hand stores, Little Nemo (Boulevard Lemonnier 25), named after the first-ever animated cartoon, and Le Depot (Rue du Midi 108), which has been drawing collectors buying and selling their BD’s for over 50 years. For those who can’t leave Brussels without some Tintin souvenirs, then there is every gadget imaginable at the Boutique de Tintin (Rue de la Colline 13, www.tintin.com). And finally, don’t forget to walk over to the bohemian Marolles neighbourhood where every morning, the Jeu de Balle square is turned into a vast flea market, with booksellers hawking everything from 1950’s copies of Le Journal de Tintin, vintage Mickey Mouse and faded Spirou magazines, to modern Mangas, science fiction and erotic comic strips.

2009 & 2010 - Years of the Comic Strip

To coincide with the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Belgian Comic Strip Centre in Brussels, 2009 & 2010 have been designated the Years of the Comic Strip with a host of events scheduled, not only in the Belgian capital itself, but over the whole of Wallonia, temporarily rechristened “The Comic Strip’s Country” for the occasion. Celebrations will be officially inaugurated with a gigantic Balloon Day Parade in Brussels on the weekend of the Mardi Gras carnival at the end of February, already an annual excuse for colourful festivals and partying across the whole of Belgium.

Balloon Day Parades originate in the United States, created first of all in 1924 by Macy’s Department Store in New York.

These parades are now featured across hundreds of American cities with crowds in the millions, featuring giant helium-filled balloons shaped as everything from animals to vehicles. But of course, for the Brussels parade they will all be floating giant-sized replicas of everyone’s favourite comic strip characters, turning the city into a vast open-air theatre.

The major exhibition of this special year will take place in the prestigious Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, a grandiose venue more used to holding shows of Old Masters like Rubens and Brueghel rather than contemporary upstarts from the irreverent world of the Comic Strip. Entitled “Plural Persectives: the Belgian Comic Strip” (27 March to 30

June 2009), the exhibition will be made up of 20 individual spaces, each with its own scenography, each honouring a specific Belgian creator, featuring their own drawings alongside the comic strips they read as children to examine the graphic sources that inspired the work they later became famous for. In addition, works of 100 comic strip authors from around the world will also be shown, including American classics like Alex Raymond’s “Flash Gordon”, and Charlie Brown, Snoopy and all their pals from Schultz’s timeless “Peanuts”, alongside European legends like Hugo Pratt’s “Corto Maltese”.

Modern comic strips often have a surprisingly audacious erotic side to them, and to find out more about this seductive world, be sure to visit the “The Sexties” exhibiton that will be held in the Bozar, Brussels’ dazzling Art Deco Centre for Fine Arts (25 September 2009 - 3 January 2010). Starting in the revolutionary era of the 1960’s, influenced by everything from Pop Art to the Beatles, the student riots of May 68 to experimental cinema, the show centres on the works of four influential artists, who moved comic strips beyond the realm of children. Frenchman Jean-Claude Forest caused the first shock wave, creating the first-ever “adult” comic, “Barbarella”, whose physique was inspired by Brigitte Bardot and then vividly portrayed on celluloid by Jane Fonda in Roger Vadim’s film. Guido Crepax began by drawing a sexy lady called “Valentina”, and then turned his hand to the classics of eroticism, adapting “The History of O”, “Emmanuelle” and “Justine” into comic strips. Paul Cuvelier had a passion for sensually drawing the human body - especially the female form - while Guy Peelleart was initially inspired by

sultry French singers like Sylvie Vartan and Francoise Hardy to create erotic comic strips, and then designed iconic album covers like “It’s Only Rock and Roll” by the Rolling Stones and Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs, which today are recognised as art works in their own right.

Throughout the year, the Belgian Comic Strip Centre itself will present a series of different exhibitions, but the one that catches the eye is “From Yellow Peril to World Comic Strips” (24 February-7 June), which addresses the phenomenon over the last twenty years of the enormous success in Europe of Asian, and particularly Japanese, comic strips. Artists like Jiro Tanigushi whose “Akira” series has sold millions, have transformed the way people read, create and publish comic strips, and now in another example of globalisation, Europeans and Asians influence each other, creating what is known as “world comic strips”.

Any exhibition featuring cartoon super heroes like Superman and Batman will immediately attract a young audience, but parents dragged along by their children will also find a much more serious side to “From Superman to Rabbi’s Cat” at the

Belgian Jewish Museum (6 May-16 August). This fascinating show will highlight the important role played by Jewish artists and authors in comic strips. Spanning 120 years of cartoon history, with a massive 230 works, the exhibition begins with immigrants arriving in America in the early twentieth century, with New York-based Jewish artists publishing in Yiddish and English-language newspapers. It is after the stock market crash of 1929 that Jewish comic strip artists responded to the Great Depression and rise of fascism in Europe by creating superheroes like Superman, Batman and Captain America as indefatigable upholders of Law and Order, endeavouring to ensure world order. With all the problems of the present Credit Crunch, you may well ask who is going to be the Superhero to save us today. Much of this moral righteousness evaporated after the Second World War, and some artists like Harvey Kurtzman, founder of MAD magazine, railed against the political establishment, while others like Bernard Klingstein turned to telling the story of the concentration camps in “Master Race”, culminating in Art Spiegelman’s Shoah masterpiece, “Maus”. Finally, the exhibition addresses more contemporary Jewish comic strip artists here in Europe, especially Vittorio Giardino, the Golem figure of Spain’s Jorge Zentner, and popular publications in France by Joann Sfar - “The Rabbi’s Cat” and “Klezmer” - which return to the roots of Jewish history and tradition. Outside of Brussels itself, a host of other towns across Wallonia will present a yearlong calendar of events around the ComicStrip theme - not just formal exhibitions in museums, but outdoors in public squares or during music festivals. If the Belgian comic strip really took off with Hergé’s adventures of Tintin, the French-language comic strip genre actually originated in Wallonia which had and still has two out of the country’s three main publishers of comic strip. The Editions Dupuis, based in Marcinelle near Charleroi saw the birth of the colourful and very fanciful “Marcinelle School” and its famous Bande des Quatres (“band of four”) Franquin, Jijé, Morris and Will, creators of the likes of Lucky Luke, Gaston Lagaffe, Boule et Bill and Spirou, and nowadays modern heroes such as Kid Paddle, XIII, Largo Winch, while Casterman from Tournai, one of the oldest publishers of comic strip in the world, took over the publishing of the weekly comic Le Petit Vingtième which featured the work of Hergé, publishing the first adventure of Tintin in full colour version with hardcover.

The rest, as they say, is history and both companies now publish the very prolific younger generation of Belgian artists as well as Manga.

The Hergé Museum in Louvain-La-Neuve (Walloon Brabant)

The 2009 highpoint of the comic strip years in Wallonia took undoubtedly place in Louvain-la-Neuve, where a brand new museum is dedicated to the life and work of none other than the great Hergé. Inaugurated in May 2009, the sleek modern museum does look not just at all those famous “Adventures of Tintin”, but the whole artistic output - paintings, sculpture, photography, film - of this prolific creator. For a comprehensive introduction to this amazing new place, visit www.museeherge.com.

A trip to Waterloo,just outside Brussels, is a must for anyone interested in military history, and an extra reason to go in May is to visit the Wellington Museum, where the witty exhibition “The Pencil Stroke and the Empire” (www.museewellington.be), presents historical comic strips relating to

the Battle of Waterloo and the Napoleonic Wars, as well as leading protagonists like Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington. Other major destinations in Wallonia that will be honouring the Ninth Art include Namur, with an exhibition dedicated to the German painter and caricaturist, Wilhelm Busch (www.ciger.be/rops), considered to be one of the fathers of the comic strip, plus “Tintin in the Cinema”, a fascinating look at memorabilia from the actual movie films of- Tintin’s adventures - including the great reporter’s golfing trousers - in the tourism office of Spa (www.spa-info.be). Moreover, an exhibition dedicated to cars in the comic strip, “L’automobile dans la BD”, will be held at the F1 Grand Prix Museum of Stavelot, at the Abbaye of Stavelot, from 08 May to 20 September 2009. While kids will not want to miss Rami the Mammoth (www.ramioul.org), a computer generated, interactive comic strip that mirrors Jurassic Park, and naturally takes place in the prehistoric animal’s home village of Ramioul. The list of events goes on and on throughout 2009, and for a full schedule just check the web site: www.bdwallonie.be.

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