With Nero, Marc Sleen holds the world record of issues of a comic book series title drawn by the same author.

[2] [3] The series debuted in the newspaper De Nieuwe Gids in the autumn of 1947 and was written and drawn by Marc Sleen from the start.

Near the end of the story the character regained his senses and revealed his real name was "Schoonpaard" (in reprints this was changed to "Heiremans", in both cases inside joke references to colleagues of Sleen).

[5] The character proved popular and remained a friend of Van Zwam in the next stories, though everyone kept referring to him as "Nero" rather than by his real name.

During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960 The Adventures of Nero was popular enough to rival Willy Vandersteen's Suske en Wiske which was published in De Standaard.

In the story De IJzeren Kolonel ("The Iron Colonel") (1956), for instance, the then-current Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising are incorporated into the plot.

The series also had cameos by several Belgian and internationally famous politicians, such as Paul-Henri Spaak, Achiel Van Acker, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Wilfried Martens, Jean-Pierre Van Rossem, Jean-Luc Dehaene, Jozef Stalin, Mobutu, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hirohito, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Idi Amin, Khomeini, Margaret Thatcher and Saddam Hussein.

Media celebrities, such as The Beatles, Pablo Escobar, Urbanus, Paul Newman and Frank Zappa were also frequently caricatured.

[9] Attempts have been made to translate Nero to the Dutch, British, French, German and South African market.

Its loose drawing style and story lines replete with folly were an inspiration for Urbanus, Biebel, Cowboy Henk, among others.

Dutch artists like Martin Lodewijk (Agent 327) and René Windig and Eric De Jong ("Heinz") are also notable fans.

Nero has a bronze statue in Hoeilaart, sculpted by Luc Cauwenberghs, which was erected in 1994 in front of the old tram station.

[15] In 1984 composer Johan De Smet, conductor Vincent D'Hondt and director Arne Sierens chose upon the "Nero" story Het Rattenkasteel ("The Rats' Castle") (1947) for an opera adaptation.

The entire cast of the series was sculpted on a bas-relief in Sint-Niklaas, made by sculptor Paul Dekker in 1988 to commemorate Marc Sleen's appointment as an honorary citizen of the city.

In the room dedicated to his work everything is designed to look like Nero's cosy home, complete with a tower of Belgian waffles and champagne nearby.

In 2014 a wall was dedicated to "Nero" in the Kloosterstraat in Antwerp, depicting a scene from the album "De Oliespuiter" ("The Oil Injector").

In one of the episodes Carmen is thinking of a name for her dog and coincidentally sees the daily "Nero" comic in the newspaper.