Willy Vandersteen

In a career spanning 50 years, he created a large studio and published more than 1,000 comic albums in over 25 series, selling more than 200 million copies worldwide.

Hergé called him "The Brueghel of the comic strip", while the creation of his own studio and the mass production and commercialization of his work turned him into "the Walt Disney of the Low Countries".

[4] Vandersteen is best known for Suske en Wiske (published in English as Spike and Suzy, Luke and Lucy, Willy and Wanda or Bob and Bobette), which in 2008 sold 3.5 million books.

[5] His family lived in the Seefhoek, a poor quarter of the city, where his father Francis Vandersteen worked as a decorator and wood sculptor.

At 13, he enrolled at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp to study sculpture, and two years later he started working as sculptor and decorator, just like his father.

[7] The same year, the family moved to Deurne, a suburb of Antwerp, where he came in contact with nature and with scouting, which both had a profound impact on his character and his later work.

He rediscovered Hergé with The Adventures of Tintin in Le Petit Vingtième, and also the realistic work of Hal Foster in Prince Valiant.

When the German occupier forbade the publication of American and British comics in the Belgian newspapers and magazines, opportunities arose for local people.

[10] In 1942, Vandersteen quit his job at L'Innovation and started working at the Landbouw- en Voedingscorporatie (a government organisation for the agricultural sector), where he illustrated some magazines.

[11] That same year, he illustrated the pro-occupation book Zóó zag Brussel de Dietsche Militanten under the pen name Kaproen.

[1] At the Corporatie, Vandersteen met a colleague whose wife worked at Bravo, a weekly Flemish comics magazine that appeared since 1936 and had a French-language version since 1940.

Led by established Walloon illustrator Jean Dratz, a young team was gathered, with artists like Edgar P. Jacobs and Jacques Laudy.

[15] On 30 March 1945, the daily comic strip Rikki en Wiske started to appear in the newspaper De Nieuwe Standaard, after a positive review by the young illustrator Marc Sleen.

Apart from his work for De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, he contributed to Ons Volk and Ons Volkske, he made a special Suske en Wiske story for het Parochieblad (a weekly Christian newspaper), and he started to contribute to Kuifje journal (Tintin magazine) that published Hergé.

A popular Flemish author would give the sales a boost, while it could mean the breakthrough on the French language market for Vandersteen.

However, Hergé, as editor-in-chief, set a very high quality standard for his magazine, and Vandersteen had to improve and stylize his drawings, and had to remove the more Flemish, popular aspects of his comics.

Vandersteen obliged, and the stories of Suske en Wiske he created for Kuifje are now considered the best of his career, with the first one, Het Spaanse Spook (The Spanish Ghost), which started on 16 September 1948, as his masterpiece.

Many of these stories were loosely based on popular classics, ranging from Alexandre Dumas over Buffalo Bill to Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, with as culmination his comic in two parts of the legend of Till Eulenspiegel, made for Kuifje.

Together with the publications in Kuifje, it made Vandersteen a popular artist in Wallonia as well, and all Bessy and Suske en Wiske comics were published by Erasme in French.

When in late 1967 Verschuere quit, and at the same time Bastei increased the rhythm again, now to one complete comic a week, the Studio was disbanded and Sels and Gastmans started to work on a freelance basis.

The success led to the creation of a comics series as well, with as main contributors Verschuere, Eduard De Rop, and Vandersteen's son Bob.

De Rode Ridder became the third main success story of Vandersteen, and is now the longest running series behind Suske en Wiske.

[42] In these years, Suske en Wiske reached its peak popularity, and the older stories now were republished in colours in the main series.

Vandersteen, now a celebrated artist with complete TV shows made about him, both in the Netherlands and in Belgium, continued to work on his comics.

[50] Willy Vandersteen created one last new series in 1985: De Geuzen, a historical, humoristic comic set in Flanders in the sixteenth century.

Similar in theme to the thirty years older Tijl Uilenspiegel, the comic combined many of Vandersteen's passions, including the art of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

The first German translations appeared in 1954, and in the 1960s Bessy and to a lesser extent Jerom were an enormous success, with combined over 1000 weekly comics with a circulation of some 200,000 copies.

In the following years, Vandersteen's comics and especially Suske en Wiske were published in dozens of languages, but in most cases only one or a few albums are translated.

[58] Other merchandising ranged from Suske en Wiske drinking glasses in 1954 to 5 large handpainted ceramic statues of the main heroes in 1952.

[59] According to UNESCO's Index Translationum, Vandersteen is the sixth most often translated Dutch language author, after Anne Frank, Dick Bruna, Cees Nooteboom, Guido van Genechten, and Phil Bosmans and before famous authors as Janwillem van de Wetering, Harry Mulisch, Hugo Claus, and Johan Huizinga.

Vandersteen & Geerts (1985)
Bust of Vandersteen in Kalmthout