Luc Cromheecke (born 2 August 1961), is a Belgian comics artist best known for the comic series Tom Carbon, Taco Zip, Roboboy and Plunk.
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Luc Cromheecke was born in Antwerp in 1961.[1] After having studied painting, graphic arts and publicity at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts of Antwerp, he created the magazine "Flan Imperial" with fellow student Fritzgerald; it featured material by Dutch artists René Windig and Eddie De Jong. The magazine sold badly despite a short review in Robbedoes, and folded after one issue.
In 1983 Cromheecke started the comic strip Taco Zip, which appears in Robbedoes, De Volkskrant, and De Morgen. He creates in the next years the series Tom Carbon, which appears in the Dutch magazine Sjors and again in Robbedoes. Both series have an initial run of 4 albums, and Tom Carbon gets translated in French and German. In 1989, he is invited by the Comics Museum in Brussels to make the material for the displays about merchandising, for which he uses a minor character from Taco Zip, the mad alien Plunk.
In the next years, Cromheecke does a number of short lived series and makes many illustrations for magazines and for publicity campaigns. In 1994, he partakes in an exposition of young talents at the Angoulême International Comics Festival with Lewis Trondheim and others. He also makes a few CD-roms, and a short-lived series Ben le Forestier for the French magazine Astrapi, but in general seems to have quit the comics scene in those years.
In 2003, he returns with Roboboy, a juvenile series about a robot child living with a normal family, and the havoc it unwillingly creates. The renewed interest in his work this generates sparks additional comics from some old series like Tom Carbon and Taco Zip. Together with Jean-Michel Thiriet, he creates since many years a weekly page in Spirou to get people to take a subscription. In 2006, he also creates the spin-off series Plunk for Spirou, and publishes the first album of Ben de Boswachter. An exposition celebrating twenty years of Taco Zip debutes at Strip Turnhout in Turnhout, and travels around different cities in Belgium and the Netherlands, including the oldest comic shop of Europe, Lambiek in Amsterdam[2] Cromheecke draws at the end of 2005 the cover for the last issue of Robbedoes magazine after 67 years, which is also used for the last collection of Robbedoes magazines, album #262.
Cromheecke cites as his influences American comic strips like B.C. and Peanuts.[3]
His comics have been translated in many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Danish and Indonesian.[4]