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A graphic tale
Cartoons are big in Belgium. Adrian Mourby is drawn to Brussels to discover why
Brussels has had a long association with the comic strip. Georges Remi (Hergé) worked here, creating Tintin, André Franquin worked for Hergé and then created his own hero, Gaston Lagaffe, and it’s where Pierre Culliford (Peyo) created the Smurfs.
The city’s association with the Ninth Art (as comic strips are known among aficionados) has been celebrated in many ways. In 1989, just before the Berlin Wall came down, Brussels opened its Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art (Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée) in a former department store designed by Victor Horta.
If Horta, one of the geniuses behind art nouveau, and René Magritte, Europe’s most successful surrealist, represent the achievements of Belgian art in the first half of the 20th century, then Hergé, Franquin and Peyo may be said to represent what Belgium achieved in the second half. And don’t forget Philippe Geluck’s Cat, the large, white dog Cubitus, drawn by Luc Dupanloup (aka Dupa) and Broussaille, the young hero of several graphic novels by Frank Pé.
You can find beautifully painted murals of these characters all around Brussels, as part of the Comic Strip Trail. Since 1991, the city has been using blank gable ends to create over 30 two or three-storey high cartoon images.
In the Plattesteen, Broussaille and his girlfriend can be seen strolling along, Geluck’s Cat looms on the side of a house near the Palais de Justice, and in Rue de Flandre there’s a huge mural of Cubitus urinating like the legendary Manneken Pis.
It has been said that Brussels appears in more graphic novels than any other city in the world, with the exception of New York. While this has still to be proven, it’s certainly true that Belgian cartoonists happily and proudly put their own world into their work. The vast Palais de Justice, for instance, can be found in Henri Vernes’ Snake, Jean Graton’s Racing Show and Tibet’s Les Témoins du Satan. In Christian Denayer’s Le Spit du Snack, it is depicted as a ruined temple surrounded by tropical vegetation. And in Francois Schuiten’s Les Cités Obscures, it is dwarfed by futuristic skyscrapers and aerial roadways.
No wonder the city is promoting itself alongside Comic Strip Year. The first big event is the opening Balloon Day parade on 28 February. Gigantic helium balloons in the shapes of comic-strip characters will join police, fire brigade and marching bands crossing the city from Brussels Nord train station to Brussels Midi via the Boulevard Adolphe Max and Boulevard Anspach.
The city’s museums are also putting on a host of exhibitions, including Sideways Glances at Belgian Cartoons (Les Regards Croisés de la Bande Dessinée Belge) on 27 March to 30 June at the prestigious Royal Museums for Fine Arts. Les Sexties – a look at how cartoon art lost its innocence – will be at BOZAR from 25 September 2009 to 3 January 2010.
At Comic Strip House, there will be a Vandersteen retrospective, honouring the man whom Hergé called the Brueghel of the comic strip, from 16 June to 15 November. At the Raymond Leblanc Foundation, there will be celebrations of Brussels in comic strips and of the work of that honorary Belgian René Goscinny, who wrote the Asterix books. Plus, from 7 to 10 May, the largest drawing board in the world will be created in the Grand Place, displaying 500m² of comic strips.
All this attention being focused on the ninth art inevitably poses the question why Belgium has become one of the world’s great comic strip cultures. The answer is probably three-fold. First, the Belgians – both the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons – have a subversive sense of humour well suited to comic art.
Second, both cultures have frequently been threatened by their more powerful neighbours. Occupation often leads to imaginative ways of striking back. In Brussels, as in Prague, the puppet became a powerful tool for making statements that would be dangerous coming directly from a person’s mouth.
Brussels’ Toone Theatre, in Impasse Schuddeveld, is a museum to the puppetry that sprang up after Spanish troops closed the theatres in the 17th century. And today, Belgians still have regard for what comic characters can get up to.
Finally, when you include the German-speaking areas of Eupen and Malmedy, Belgium is a trilingual country. The cartoon strip is an art form that can easily be produced in several different languages, simply by changing the captions and speech balloons quite late in the production process. Whereas it can be a major undertaking to translate Georges Simenon’s Maigret stories into Dutch or English, making Philippe Geluck’s Cat speak Dutch, French or English can be done quite simply. For this reason, Belgium is these days much better known for its comic strips than its novels.
This year looks like being a big one for cartoons and it may well be the year that confirms Brussels as the comic-strip capital of the world.
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