DirkJan is an underachiever who stumbles through life in mostly three-panel gag-a-day comic strips.

He started out in 1989 as a student at the current Radboud University Nijmegen[2] in the Netherlands, where he lived in a typical student house with all the stereotypical sidekicks, such as the frat boy, the beer drinker, the bossy girl who checks if everybody keeps to the house rules, and the tramps who use the heated shared hallway to stay the night.

It then moved on to monthly publication in the student magazine of Nijmegen (Algemeen Nijmeegs Studentenblad, ANS).

DirkJan became known nationally when the then only commercial comics magazine of the Netherlands SjoSji (now defunct) started publishing the strip.

Most of the student sidekicks got cancelled and DirkJan left university, first for jail (DJ is a notorious Kabouter abuser) and then to wander the globe and indeed space.