But look closer and you begin to see that the wonderful collage style of the stories hearkens back to a different period — namely, the high-water mark of underground experimentation in the 1960s and 70s (think Oz/IT/Cyclops) — and that Dickon is a very different kind of hero, again with echoes from that Hippie era (his intra-dimensional adventuring is pure Jerry Cornelius, and his left-wing politics certainly don’t fit the 1930s-40s template).
Dickon may be a delightful mish-mash of influences and styles, but call him ‘postmodern’ and he’s likely to want to ‘teach you a lesson’ — without getting his Jermyn Street tailored shirt creased, of course.
The roots of collage comic-strip can be found in the sound-collage experiments of Ron Geesin, the animations of Monty Python (during the Terry Gilliam era), the surrealist novels of Max Ernst (Une Semaine de Bonté and 'La femme de 100 têtes), the agit-prop visuals of the Situationists, the psychedelic posters and graphics of Martin Sharp and the satires of Biff.
He has since has illustrated more than a dozen entries in the Introducing... series, published by Icon Books in the UK, including four titles written by Ziauddin Sardar.
Van Loon has written, designed and illustrated two model-making books: DNA: The Marvellous Molecule, which enables the reader to build a colour model of the double-helix structure discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James D. Watson with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin; and Geodesic Domes, where the models celebrate the pioneering work of Buckminster Fuller.