Willy Vandersteen
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Willy Vandersteen (February 15, 1913 - August 28, 1990) was a Flemish creator of comic books. His most famous creation is the Spike and Suzy series. ("Suske en Wiske" in Dutch).
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Youth and early work
Willy Vandersteen was born in Antwerp in 1913 in a poor family.[1] His father was a decorator and stone sculptor, and Willy was creatively active from his youth on. He used to draw pictures with crayons on the sidewalks, and tell stories to his friends about them.
From 1939 on, he started making short comics, first for the factory magazine of the Inno warehouse (l'Innovation) where he worked as a decorator.[1] He made many illustrations during the second World War, some of them for Nazi-friendly publications, but most fairly neutral and juvenile. For the youth magazine Wonderland he creates Thor de holbewoner (Thor the troglodyte).
In 1943, he published his first comic album, Piwo (about the adventures of a wooden horse), followed by two more episodes in 1944 and 1946.
[edit] After World War II
After the war, many publications aimed at youth appeared in Belgium (either only in Flemish or in French, or in two editions), and Willy Vandersteen worked for many of these. He made some short comics and some longer adventures for the famous magazine Bravo, which also employed people like Edgar P. Jacobs.
But the main publishing possibility in Flanders was the newspapers, so Willy Vandersteen started with the adventures of Rikki en Wiske in 1945 in De Nieuwe Standaard. After one story, Rikki gets replaced by Suske (Spike), and the long series of adventures of Suske en Wiske (Spike and Suzy) began. In the early fifties, he was invited to collaborate on the Tintin magazine of Hergé, which also employed Edgar P. Jacobs, Bob de Moor and Jacques Martin as well, and he makes 8 of the most critically acclaimed[2] Suske en Wiske stories for it (these become The Blue Series), as well as a few other comics.
[edit] Some other work
Willy Vandersteen has always had a huge diversity of series, and besides Suske en Wiske, he also is known for De Familie Snoek (The Snoek family), De grappen van Lambik (Lambik's Jokes, a spin off from Suske en Wiske), Jerom (another spin-off), Bessy (a series about a boy in the Far West and his dog, based on Lassie), De Rode Ridder (Red Knight, a medieval, more realistic series), Karl May, Robert en Bertrand (about two tramps around 1900), and "De Geuzen" (about the Dutch resistance to the Spanish rulers at the end of the 16th century). In the forties and the early fifties, he made many more short-lived series, most of them hard to find nowadays.
[edit] International success
Bessy and De Rode Ridder were truly successful, although both were eclipsed by the success of Suske en Wiske, which had first editions of some 400,000 copies for every new book (four to six a year) in the 1970's, in Dutch only. Suske en Wiske has been translated into most major languages and some adventures with local interest also into more exotic languages, like Tibetan. In Germany, "Bessy" was highly successful, with new weekly episodes. In the end, more than a thousand were made.
Willy Vandersteen was awarded the 1977 Angoulême International Comics Festival Best foreign comics author prize.
[edit] The studio
To cope with the success and the huge amount of work, Vandersteen creates a studio in 1951. Most of these series were started by Vandersteen and then continued by one or more collaborators, often under the name of Studio Vandersteen. Only after many years did he allow the name of these artists to appear on the cover or on the inside of the comics, but they still were published under his name, like a quality label (a bit like Disney). Some of the most famous collaborators are Karel Verschuere for Bessy, Karel Biddeloo for De Rode Ridder, and Paul Geerts for Suske en Wiske. Nowadays, many of these series are stopped, but the studio still exists, mainly to produce new adventures of Suske en Wiske and De Rode Ridder.
[edit] Collecting Vandersteen
His early comics are among the most highly sought after by Flemish comics collectors nowadays and can fetch prices of up to a few thousand Euros. A complete collection, including commercial items, is almost impossible, as many of his early comics only appeared in ephemera, short-lived magazines with a limited audience. Original drawings are highly sought after.
[edit] Themes and influences
Willy Vandersteen used a wild variety of themes and influences in his work from early on. He made fairytales, historic series, westerns, but also science fiction and many contemporary comics. While some series like De Familie Snoek and Bessy stuck very close to their origin (an everyday Flemish contemporary family for the former, and a pioneer family in the American Old West in the latter), others were more loose. De Rode Ridder, the story of a medieval knight, wandered from Arthurian tales over the crusades until the explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, thereby spanning some ten centuries, and later (when Vandersteen was less involved in the series) brought in many elements of sword and sorcery and fantasy.
Suske and Wiske is a contemporary series, but many stories used the plot device of time travelling, either by a machine or by some poetic device. This enabled stories to evolve in a myriad of periods, often again in the Middle Ages though. Furthermore did Vandersteen use local legends of Antwerp and Limburg, parodies of American superheroes like Batman, science fiction, and popular TV series.[1]
Some of the earliest realistic comics of Willy Vandersteen also clearly show the strong influence he has had from American comics like Prince Valiant and Tarzan, but he later developed his own distinctive style.
[edit] Awards
- 1977: Best Foreign Author at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, France
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c De Weyer, Geert (2005). "Willy Vandersteen". In België gestript, pp. 169-171. Tielt: Lannoo.
- ^
