Book Review Essay: A Colonial Perspective on the Indonesia-Netherlands Comics Connection

Book Review Essay: A Colonial Perspective on the Indonesia-Netherlands Comics Connection

by Rik Spanjers

Ruud den Drijver. Indocomics: de ‘katjangs’ van de stripkunst. Amsterdam: Baltimore Publications, 2022. 9789082654936

 The academic research of comics is inextricably entangled with the work that, in past and present, has been done by makers, collectors, reviewers and fans. Comics research in the United States would not have been the same without some of its initial gestures in the works of Coulton Waugh, Jules Feiffer, Will Eisner, Ron Goulart, Mort Walker, art historian David Kunzle and Jim Steranko. In France, as Ian Horton and Maggie Gray have recently shown in Art History for Comics (2022), comics research started in the 60s from the work done in the Club des Bandes Dessinées and the Société civile d’études et de recherches des littératures dessinées (Horton and Gray 2022, 13). In the Netherlands too, it is impossible to think comics outside the early work of Kees and Evelien Kousemaker, whose Strip voor Strip, een verkenningstocht (1970)[1]  and the slightly later Wordt Vervolgd: Stripleksikon der Lage Landen (1979)[2] laid the foundations for the historiography of 20^th century Dutch comics culture.[3]

            Within the context of comics studies, then, it does not make sense to think in terms of professional and amateur research, or research done within the context of academic institutions and independent research. Instead, comics studies consists of many different kinds of research aimed at different publics. In the Netherlands, for example, Joost Pollmann, on the one hand, combines his work as journalist and (comics) reviewer with specialist publications on comics culture such as Letterlijk en figuurlijk: Strips kun je beter lezen (2011)[4] and De Stripprofessor: vijftig colleges over tekenkunst (2016).[5] On the other hand, Kees Ribbens, who in the context of his work as an endowed professor of Popular Historical Culture of Global Conflicts and Mass Violence at Erasmus University Rotterdam has written about comics for several academic publications, has also co-published[6] an overview of the representation of history in comics that has a broader public in mind than his academic work (Getekende tijd: Wisselwerking tussen geschiedenis en strip 2006) [7].

            Just as all papers for academic journals have certain generic commonalities, the first moves of early comics studies in different national context are also alike in specific ways. One of the most important one of these is that, possibly in an attempt to counteract the ghettoization of the comics medium, comics culture is often placed in rather broad art historical contexts. Early comics historians have tied the medium of comics to a rather incredibly wide array of art historical traditions and/or specific works such as caricature, Trajan’s Column, the Bayeux Tapestry, catchpenny prints, hieroglyphics and the cave paintings of Lascaux. And even if I have been recently convinced by Ian Horton and Maggie Gray (or by Kunzle 40 years ago) that this art historical emplacement of comics within broader pictorial traditions is not without merit, I have always been very suspicious of many of the all-to-easy connections that have been established between contemporary comics and some of the more consecrated works and traditions from the canon of European art history. Such comparisons are emancipatory first and foremost, which is why many of them would not endure into a more rigorous historiography of the medium.

              It is exactly in this connection between European art history and comics culture that the recently published Indocomics: De ‘katjangs’ van de stripkunst,[8] unveils its most important claim for Indonesian comics. In the third chapter of his book, “Het ‘katjang’ mysterie,”[9] Ruud den Drijver names the warthog (or pig) painted on the wall of the Sampeang Cave on South-Celebes as the oldest ancestor of contemporary comics characters (den Drijver 2022, 61). He does so somewhat tongue-in-cheek, clearly cognizant of the hyperbole of the assertion that he constructs here. With this one move, den Drijver manages to undermine the now so clearly Eurocentric perspective of many other comics histories. By choosing to compare comics to a clearly Eurocentric conception of art history, these histories restate the emancipatory underpinnings of this comparison. If we really want to investigate comics in a broader art historical context, the Sampeang warthog shows us, it does not make sense to replicate a brand of 19^th century Eurocentrism while doing so. This should be the goal of a history of the interactions between Indonesian and Dutch comics culture. Such a history destabilizes existing preconceptions of the differences between “West” and “East” and combats stereotype and essentialism in the depiction of both Indonesia and the Netherlands. Excepting the warthog, however, Indocomics is not such a history.

            Instead, den Drijver’s book offers an uncritical retracing of Dutch orientalist stereotypes which imprison the works of comics art that are discussed in it back into a colonial perspective. This does not mean that there is nothing of worth in this book. The work deserves praise for the way in which it maps the influence of what might be called the Indonesian-Dutch comics connection. Den Drijver is right to point to the prominence of Indo-European comics artist in the history of Dutch comics culture; creators such as Eppo Doeve, Thé Tjong-Khing, Aimée de Jong, Paul Teng, Peter van Dongen, and Peter Nuyten have and continue to play a central role in the development of Dutch comics culture.

            But Indocomics is not just an attempt to sketch the individual histories of these comics artists, but is also a search for the “unique mark”[10] that these creators have left on comics culture (den Drijver 2022: 131). The word “unique” gestures towards much that is problematic about the approach that den Drijver pursues in Indocomics. In what way can the (post-) colonial context of Indonesia and the Netherlands be a place to talk about uniqueness? It is already incredibly difficult, if not impossible, as den Drijver himself shows, to offer neatly defined descriptions of the different nationalities of the creators that are discussed in this work (den Drijver 2022: 7). For a long time, birth in the Dutch-Indies did not make one a Dutch citizen, but a Dutch subject. Citizenship was only possible for those who were born in the Dutch-Indies and who had either a Dutch father or two Dutch parents. This complexity disappeared partly after Indonesia’s independence after World War II, but was quickly replaced by a less-formally-anchored, yet just as complicated web of imagined and lived identities, such as Indonesian, Indo-European, Toktok, Molukkan, and Dutch (Oostindie 2011: 26-33). This all goes to show how difficult and dangerous it is to subsume all these different relationships of individuals to the colonial history of Indonesia and the Netherlands into a singular experience, which, in turn, might be characterized by a “unique” approach to comics. The experiences of different Dutch postcolonial subjects have varied substantially, not in the least based on the colors of their skins. What is more, these complexities multiply when one adds the illusionary character of any kind of uniform Indonesian or Dutch national context to it. As Benedict Anderson shows in Imagined Communities (2016), some perceived differences between national cultures are the product of a process of uniformization that started in 19^th century Europe. One can try and define Dutch culture positively, but often Dutch citizens cannot venture past cliches such as the struggle against water, the 16^th century golden age, “polderen,” pillarization, tulips, directness, and stinginess (Wekker 2016: 20-21). However, if one starts looking at different parts of the Netherlands, or even individual Dutch people, such cliches often are very poor descriptors. For Indonesia, a country that consists of approximately 17.500 islands, 270 million inhabitants, and at least 1300 different cultural communities of different sizes, references to a uniform national culture, or a national character, are even more preposterous.

            Throughout Indocomics, however, to characterize the uniqueness of Indonesian-Dutch comics creators, he makes references to such national cultures:

 

An explanation [of the uniqueness of comics made by makers with a Dutch-Indies background] might be found in the [Dutch] “just be normal”-mentality. Only those who carry within themselves the traces of a different, less sober culture, can extract themselves from this national character. This raises the question whether comics creators with a Dutch-Indies background differentiate themselves from others, and if they do, how this difference is marked. And can connections be made to the Javanese or Balinese culture? (den Drijver 2022: 9).[11]

 

By presenting the Dutch national character as something negative from which creators with a Dutch Indies background can extricate themselves on the basis of a “carried trace” of a different culture, den Drijver seems to be placing Dutch culture in a bad light. Furthermore, by distinguishing between Javanese and Balinese culture, den Drijver at least introduces some diversity into his description of Indonesian cultural history. Describing culture as carried traces, however, reproduces the othering of Dutch persons of color in the Netherlands (Wekker 2016: 7, 15).

            Throughout Indocomics, den Drijver pushes to find difference between comics made by creators who do and do not have a background in the Dutch Indies. In that sense, Indocomics is a strong example of the way in which colonial history is other othered from the national historical narrative, instead of approached as an integral part to it (Wekker 2016, 13). This skewed perspective causes den Drijver to countermand the complexity introduced by the incredibly intricately crosshatched history of Indonesia and the Netherlands with a stylistic analysis based on colonial stereotypes and a binary division between “West” and “East”. Comics creators with a background in the Dutch Indies are described as introducing “sambal”[12] (den Drijver 2022: 11), a “magical” atmosphere through the heavy use of black shading (14), and as referring, both consciously and unconsciously to “East-Indonesian art … famous for its wajang puppet theatre and colorfully painted wall panels” (25).[13] In his attempts to create a separate category within Dutch comics culture for creators with a background in the Dutch Indies, then, den Drijver lapses into colonial stereotyping. For it is only from such a colonial perspective that the category of “Indocomics” gains enough coherency to make sense.

            Take, for example, den Drijver’s analysis of Iris (1968) by Hertog van Banda and Thé Tjong-Khing. Den Drijver’s argument is that this comic should not only be read in the context of Pop Art works such as Jodelle (1966) by Guy Peelaert. Because of its use of primary colors, which are supposed to remind readers of Javanese wall panels (den Drijver 2022: 22), it should be seen as a prominent example of the early “Indocomics.” Perceived as a whole, however, Iris is much closer to the work of Peelaert and other sixties counterculture comix, than it is to Javanese wall panel art. One can definitely argue that traces of a Javanese art historical tradition can be found, but by enlarging these influences at the cost of much closer—historically and culturally—inspirations, den Drijver creates a distorted view of the hybrid cultural context in which this work was produced. This distortion, moreover, becomes problematic when den Drijver, in an attempt to enlarge the Indonesian characteristics of Iris, writes, “with an almost ritual dedication Thé Tjong-Khing handles a Chinese pencil” (den Drijver 2022: 25).[14] Besides “sambal” and magic, the “Indocomic” is thus also characterized by the ritualistic way of working of its creators. Den Drijver’s tendency to highlight and enlarge difference using colonial terminology recurs when he compares creators with and without a Dutch Indies background on the bases of the art historical traditions from which these creators are purported to work:

 

The on first sight subtle, but immense difference between all these creators is that they [artists with a “Dutch” background] drew traditionally, somewhat like the classical Dutch masters. The magical lighting of Kresse, Toonder, and Wijn is a ‘clair-obscur’ that is related to Rembrandt, with at the most an exotic outing towards Caravaggio. The indocomics of Thé, Doeve, Kloezeman, van Boxsel en Van Giffen cross naturalistic boundaries in multiple ways. (den Droeve 2022: 28).[15]

 

What does den Doeve mean here? He seems to be pointing to a difference between an artificial, cinematographic form of lighting and the more naturalistic lighting of the painting of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. But can one really argue that the lighting of Rembrandt and Caravaggio is naturalistic? Den Drijver is right to see a slight difference in intensity between the use of shading/lighting in the artists he discusses here. But by connecting this kind of shading, via the detour of Jacques Tourneurs’ Night of the Demon (1957), to the Javanese shadow puppet theatre (30), instead of, for example, the use of shading in the in that time incredibly popular comics of Milton Caniff and Hugo Pratt, den Drijver’s underlines his colonial perspective.

            Besides creators who were born in the Dutch Indies and thus had a firsthand experience of the colonial past, den Drijver also includes works made by artists who were born in the Netherlands, but who had one or two parents or grandparents born in the Dutch Indies. Den Drijver locates and enlarges similar traces of Javanese and Balinese culture in the works of these makers, and notes that this second generation does refer more explicitly to the colonial past, which is something that the artists from the first generation never really did. In his analyses of the works of these more recent artists, his tendencies towards essentialist over-analysis becomes even more clear. The few examples that den Drijver picks from Peter van Dongen’s postcolonial masterpiece Rampokan (1998-2004) are not enough to place it into his previously defined category of “Indocomics.” Instead of fitting neatly within that category, Rampokan shows, in both its clear line drawing style and its narrative, the hybridity of traditions and identities that characterizes colonial history. By looking at this work with an essentialist perspective that tries to tie it down to one coherent tradition or culture, one misses everything that makes this work one of the most important Dutch comics.

            Even with an artist that has as diverse international influences as Aimée de Jongh, den Drijver continues to focus almost solely on her Indonesian roots. While noting that de Jongh’s style is heavily influenced by both the European and the Japanese comics traditions, den Drijver characterizes her page compositions in Days of Sand (2021) as “ancient Javanese and Balinese decoupages and transitions” (den Drijver 2022: 111),[16] without actually offering any substantial proof to back up his claims. I have always seen much more of the thousands of pages of Japanese comics that de Jongh has read and the many she made as a doujinshi artists in her current breakdowns than anything else. Just as was the case with van Dongen’s work, den Drijver misses the blending of different traditions that characterizes de Jongh’s work because he cannot see beyond his self-made category of “Indocomics.”

            Comics are a transnational phenomenon. As Eike Exner has recently reiterated in his Comics and the Origins of Manga (2022), it is impossible to ground manga as uniquely springing from a Japanese tradition. One can only understand manga as a transnational cultural cross-pollination. I believe the same goes for Dutch comics, which cannot be characterized through the paintings of the Dutch masters or catchpenny prints, but is a wonderfully strange amalgam of Franco-Belgian, American, Indonesian, British, and, more recently, Japanese influences. By drawing national lines through comics cultures, we risk repeating a 19^th century madness that will only bring scholarship further from understanding the object it studies.

            This does not mean, however, that there are no traces of the national in comics. Of course, it is possible to find parts of Javanese or Balinese visual traditions in comics made by creators with a background, however down the family tree, in Indonesia. But instead of conjuring up the notion that these “traces of culture” have been spoon-fed into these authors in their upbringing, comics scholars should investigate the ways in which creators that work in the present refer back to the colonial past. Den Drijver’s work, in this sense, approaches its objective backwards. Instead of thinking of cultural tradition chronologically, the author could also have started from the present. In that case, the Indonesian heritage of these creators is not an inescapable part of the national character of an artist, but, seen positively, a source of inspiration to tap from the present, and, seen negatively, a past with which they are, because of continuing systemic racism in the Netherlands, forced to relate themselves to on a daily basis. Part of what den Drijver calls “Indocomics” would then not stem from an unbroken chain of tradition, but would be works that consciously engage with the colonial past in order to shed light on it or provide it with new contexts. Much more than as prisoners of an identity defined by others, such an approach would show comics artists with an Indonesian background as cultural tastemakers that use comics to interrogate the complex colonial heritage of both Indonesia and the Netherlands. 

I would like to thank Eeva Langeveld for her critical reading of an earlier version of this piece.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 24:2.

Works Cited:

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Rise and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Edition). London: Verso. 

den Drijver, Ruud. 2022. Indocomics: de ‘katjangs’ van de stripkunst. Amsterdam: Baltimore Publications.

Exner, Eike. 2022. Comics and the Origins of Manga. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Horton, Ian and Maggie Gray. 2022. Art History for Comics: Past, Present, and Potential Futures. London: Palgrave.

Oostindie, Gert. 2011. Postcolonial Netherlands: Sixty-Five Years of Forgetting, Commemorating, Silencing. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham NC, Duke University Press.

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[1] Comic by Comic, a Reconnaissance [translation author].

[2] To Be Continued: An Encyclopedia of Comics from the Low Countries [translation author].

[3] Kees Kousemaker was also the founder of the now famous Lambiek comics shop, which was Europe’s first comics shop and is the oldest still operating comics shop in existence. Much of Kousemaker’s work on comics has found its way into the Comiclopedia, an illustrated compendium of over 14.000 comics artists from around the world.

[4] Literally and Figuratively: Reading comics [translation author].

[5] The Comics Professor: Fifty Classes on Comics [translation author].

[6] With Rik Sanders.

[7] Drawn Time: The interactions between history and comics [translation author].

[8] Indocomics: the ‘katjangs’ of comics art [translation author]. The term katjang was used in the Dutch Indies and the later Dutch Indonesian community to refer to a bawdy young boy.

[9] The ‘katjang’ mystery [translation author].

[10] One of the difficulties of presenting a review of a Dutch book in English as that my translations of direct quotes might skew the perspective slightly. In this case, den Drijver writes “de unieke stemple die zij op de stripcultuur hebben achtergelaten” (den Drijver 2022: 131), which I translate as the unique mark which they left on comics culture.” I will paraphrase in the main text as much as possible, but will also note down the original Dutch texts in footnotes.

[11] Een verklaring [van de unieke stempel R.S.] kan worden gezocht in de ‘doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg’-mentaliteit. Alleen diegenen die de sporen in zich dragen van een andere, minder nuchtere cultuur, weten zich aan deze volksaard te onttrekken. Het werpt tegelijk de vraag op of het zo is dat stripmakers met een Indische achtergrond zich onderscheiden van anderen, en zo ja, waaruit dit blijkt. En valt er een verband met de Javaanse of Balinese cultuur aan te wijzen? (den Drijver 9).

[12] Sambal is a, in the Netherlands, famous spicy sauce that is associated with Indonesian cuisine. Den Drijver thus describes comics creators with a Dutch Indies background as spicing up Dutch comics culture.

[13] “de Oost-Indische schilderkunst […], bekend van wajangspelen en kleurrijk beschilderde wandpanelen” (25).

[14] “Met bijna rituele toewijding hanteerde Thé Tjong-Khing een Chinees penseel” (25). On page 33, den Drijver repeats the same colonial stereotype when he describes the rendition of a European sacrificial ritual in Romano Molenaars Roodhaar (2014-2022): “The European, Batavian rites of sacrifice are rendered by him [Molenaar] with a Balinese-sacred dedication that reminds of the precision of Asian rites.” In Dutch: “De Europese, Bataafse offerfeesten worden door hem geportretteerd met een Balinees-sacrale toewijding die aan de precisie van Aziatische rites herinnert” (den Drijver 2022: 33).

[15] Het ogenschijnlijk subtiele, maar immense verschil met al deze tekenaars was dat zij [de tekenaars met een Nederlandse achtergrond] traditioneel tekenden, ongeveer zoals de klassieke Hollandse meesters. De magische belichting van Kresse, Toonder en Wijn is een aan Rembrandt verwant ‘clair-obscur’, met hooguit een exotisch uitstapje naar Caravaggio. De indocomics van Thé, Doeve, Kloezeman, Van Boxsel en Van Giffen gingen in meerdere opzichten naturalistische grenzen over. (den Droeve 2022: 28).

[16] “aloude Javaanse en Balinese decoupages en beeldovergangen” (den Drijver 2021: 111).

Exhibit Review Essay: European comics festivals return to Angouleme and Haarlem

By Barbara Postema

Angoulême: 49e Édition Festival Internationale de la Bande Dessinée, France, March 17-20, 2022. https://www.bdangouleme.com/

Stripdagen Haarlem, Netherlands, June 3-12, 2022. https://www.stripdagenhaarlem.nl/

        After several years of cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year comics festivals are willing to give it a go again, and exhibitors and attendees are eager to participate. Both of the  festivals under discussion here were held in a beautiful historic city at venues spread across the town center, showcasing the city as a whole as well as the comics, and giving attendees room to wander if they needed to escape the crowds.

The Angoulême festival, postponed from its usual dates, was held in March for this once, where the spring-like weather made for a nice change from the usual dreary weather conditions in January. It was the 49th edition, already raising some anticipation for its 50th edition next year, for example with the selection of Julie Doucet for the Grand Prix. Her selection ensures that the anniversary next year will be historic in a number of ways—with only the third female Grand Prix winner presiding, and with Doucet being the first Canadian to take the highest honor.

As usual the festival started with a preview day for the press (March 16th), where exhibitions could be visited before they were open to the general public, often with the creators and curators present to provide commentary on the themes of the exhibits. Press day was much appreciated this year in order to see exhibitions with fewer crowds around. Programming for the press and comics professionals continued during the other days of the festival, including the International Rights Market for negotiating translations as well as adaptations to film.

However, the bulk of the events are open to everyone (at the price of a day ticket), and this includes numerous exhibitions, entry to the tents where publishers and creators are selling their comics, kids events, and signings. I spent quite some time (and money) in the tents Le Nouveau Monde and Espace BD Alternative, where small-press and alternative publishers and cartoonists hocked their wares. These two tents showed evidence of a few empty tables, signals perhaps that the move to March meant that some publishers could not attend this year due to schedule clashes, or perhaps that there were fewer international publishers and guests due to continuing COVID-19 travel restrictions. This latter possibility was also supported by the reported lack of Japanese guests and creators present at the festival, a change from previous years. Other tents throughout the city included Le Monde des Bulles, for the mainstream French comics publishers, and Manga City, where manga-related publications could be found. There was also a tent for the collectors, specializing in original art, special editions and ephemera.

Chris Ware Exhibit

But perhaps the most important aspect of the festival is the exhibitions. Every year there is a big exhibit dedicated to the previous festival’s Grand Prix winner, who gets to showcase their work. Chris Ware was elected for the Grand Prix in 2021 and at this year’s festival he presented a retrospective of his work in the fairly intimate space of the basement of Espace Franquin. The exhibition included many original pages, some of which were astounding in their size, while also bearing witness to the cartoonist’s careful and precise creative process. The show also included various objects Ware had made, including wooden models made for various family members to commemorate birthdays and anniversaries, as well as some fully constructed versions of the paper models he included in the ACME Novelty Library books, though those may have been assembled by someone else. The exhibit gave a nice sense of the great care and attention Ware dedicates to his pages, though his creative process as a whole remained mostly invisible.

Loo Hui Phang exhibition in Espace Franquin

The festival included two exhibitions devoted to the writers of comics. One was in the same building as the Ware exhibition: “Loo Hui Phang, Écrire est un Métier” shed a light on Phang’s own writing process, but also that of many other people who write for comics. Her exhibition also created awareness of the working conditions for writers for comics, who often lack labor protections and are also shut out from certain other avenues for making money in the comics world, such as selling original art, even as they contributed to the characters or the story represented in that art. She drew much needed attention to the precarious nature of work in comics.

René Goscinny exhibition in Musée d’Angoulême

The other exhibition focused on writing for comics put the spotlight on a writing superstar, René Goscinny, who wrote scenarios for numerous series, of which Asterix and Lucky Luke are probably the best known in the English-speaking world. This exhibition, mounted in the Musée d’Angoulême, provided an overview of Goscinny’s life and career while also showing his creative process, which included research, coming up with the names of characters (on of the key elements of the humor in the Asterix series), creating narrative sequences and writing a synopsis. Eventually a full script including dialogue would go to the artist (Albert Uderzo in the case of Asterix, or Morris for Lucky Luke), and the exhibition included many examples where the script pages were displayed together with the finished art for the corresponding page of comics, shedding light on a fascinating aspect of comics creation. Since comics writers tend not to produce products that work well on museum walls, their contribution to comics is sometimes easy to lose track of (as Phang’s exhibit also demonstrated), but the Goscinny exhibition managed to make the highlight on writing both illuminating and visually interesting.

Shigeru Mizuki exhibition in Musée d’Angoulême

The Musée d’Angoulême also hosted an exhibition of the work of mangaka Shigeru Mizuki, on the occasion of his hundredth birthday. The retrospective included original art from his illustrations, his war comics and his horror comics, most notably the Kitaro series. The framed original art was hung in a somewhat maze-like set-up, sometimes making for uncomfortably close quarters with other viewers, but the large original drawings of Japanese landscapes and creatures from folklore were stunning and fascinating nonetheless. The festival included two further exhibits that focused on manga, which I did not manage to view. I also skipped two exhibitions on comics for children, since I was not familiar with the works and there was so much to see.

Christophe Blain exhibition in Vaisseau Moebius

Some of this year’s FIBD highlights for me were two exhibitions held in the Vaisseau Moebius, “Christophe Blain, Dessiner le Temps” and “Sous la Plume d’Aude Picault.” Blain is particularly well known for period comics about pirates and cowboys, the series Isaac le Pirate  and Gus. Many original pages from these works were included in the exhibit, as well as cover paintings, sketches, and originals from Blain’s many other comics and from his sketchbooks. His inspiration from and homage to other media, especially classic cinema, were a particular focus of the exhibition. Aude Picault’s work was a revelation to me, as I was previously unfamiliar with her work. She has made humorous slice of life comics about a nurse, as well as travel diaries, memoir work, and several erotic comics. The exhibition of inked pages, often from the stage before speech balloons and text were added, showed off her light and elegant linework, well suited to her breezy narratives that yet include touches of social commentary.

Aude Picault exhibition in Vaisseau Moebius

The Cité BD, across the river from the Vaisseau Moebius, is a set of converted 19th-century industrial buildings which now house the BD museum and archives, as well as a large comics store. It was buzzing with festival activities and crowded with school children on the Thursday when I visited. I visited three exhibitions there that were not specific to the Festival and were scheduled to run past the dates of the festival, namely, “De Popeye à Persepolis: Bande dessinée et cinéma d’animation”, “Baudoin: Dessiner la vie” and “La page manquante: Carte blanche à Wajdi Mouad.” The Popeye to

Wajdi Mouawad exhibition in Cité BD

Persepolis exhibition was a large-scale survey showing the cross-pollination between comics and animation over the course of more than a century, including some attention to technical features of animation as well as original pages and sketches by the creators involved. The exhibition on Baudoin showed a retrospective of his entire oeuvre, featuring hundreds of original pages that showcased the brushwork of his black and white art beautifully. The exhibition created by Wajdi Mouad was the smallest of the exhibitions in the Cité BD, taking up a single room only, but it was conceptually the most immersive, since it was set up as an installation which was meant to convey some sense of Mouad’s experience reading Tintin album L’Ile Noire in Lebanon, as well as his experience with war and displacement to France, changing his perceptions of the album over time. This small room provided a novel approach to comics-related exhibitions, presenting a reader’s very personal experience with a book.

         Like the Angoulême festival, the Stripdagen Haarlem was made up of exhibitions and events spread across the heart of the city. The bi-annual festival had intended to celebrate their 15th anniversary in 2020, but had to postpone and was finally able to observe the festivities two years later,

Small Press Award nominees in the Pop-Up Store

still using the same theme, world-building, and poster art by Dieter van de Ougstraete. Haarlem lacks the year-round comics presence that Angoulême is able to sustain, thanks to institutions like the Cité BD, so the festivities and exhibitions in Haarlem were hosted by a range of more traditional museums and galleries. The headquarters for the 10 days of the festival was a pop-up store which featured festival merchandise, books by artists involved in the festival, and, an important new addition to the festival, all the submission to the Small Press Award, which made its debut at this year’s festival. The works were displayed behind plastic in a large bookcase, but could be perused with the assistance of the pop-up store’s staff.

Rijkswachters X Stripmakers at Kunst Centrum Haarlem

While the Stripdagen lasted 10 days, the main events took place during the two weekends bookending the festival. Both weekends included lectures and workshops, while the opening long weekend also featured markets where publishers, creators and antiquarians could be found selling their wares. Unable to be there during the weekend, I attended the festival on a weekday and took in six of the 20 or so exhibitions. The decorated shop windows in the Kleine Houtstraat, around the epicenter of the festival at the pop-up store, were a nice touch, and the other exhibits I visited were all in close vicinity to the store. The venerable Teylers Museum, the oldest museum in the Netherlands, hosted the Joost Swarte exhibition “Ode aan het boek,” with all the included illustrations, sketches and pages related to books in some way. There was a lot to see, but the close proximity of the pages in a single room did not give the work much room to breathe. More of Swarte’s work was on display in Galerie Kruis-Weg68, but unfortunately the gallery had limited days.

Joost Swarte exhibition in Teylers Museum

Marcel Ruijters exhibition at Museum Haarlem

Some exhibitions nearby included “Gevangen in Dromen: Wonen, Bouwen, en Beleven bij Marc-Antoine Mathieu,” “Marcel Ruijters: Terug naar 1913”, “Rijkswachters x Stripmakers” and “Het Kleinste Museum van Haarlem.” Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s oeuvre is impressive, and the title, “Imprisoned in dreams” was evocative, but I found the exhibit a little underwhelming, since while it captured the promised themes, the included images and pages were photocopies pinned to walls and did not produce much new insight into the artist’s thought or creative process. However, Mathieu’s work has previously not been particularly well-known in the Netherlands, so perhaps the exhibition will bring some deserved broader attention to the French cartoonist’s work. The exhibition next door, devoted to Marcel Ruijters’ alternate world of 1913 proved more interesting, including original drawings as well as sketchbook pages. The exhibition paid a lot of attention to the world-building Ruijters put into his alternate history, so, like the Mathieu exhibit, the show fit in well

Haarlem’s smallest museum: SFF pocket covers

with the theme of the Stripdagen. These exhibits were to be found in the Museum Haarlem and ABC Architectuurcentrum respectively. Close by, in Kunst Centrum Haarlem, was an exhibition that was also a fundraiser. Just over 20 Dutch cartoonists had been invited to decorate a small wooden figurine, made from packing crates used in the Rijksmuseum, to capture the visual detail, style, or even the atmosphere of their work of choice from the Rijksmuseum collection. The resulting figurines were on sale. The most whimsical of the exhibitions I saw was to be found at the same address as the Rijkswachters. This “smallest museum in Haarlem” took the shape of a single shop window dressed with science fiction and fantasy pockets from the 1950s and 1960s, all chosen for their colorful and imaginative covers that evoked the contents of the novels in the most vivid and lurid ways possible, providing the first hints at the world-building inside the covers. The books were all taken from the collection of festival director Tonio van Vugt.

Cor Blok exhibition in Noord-Hollands Archief

The final exhibition I went to see, and which I perhaps enjoyed most of the ones I visited at the stripdagen, was also related to book covers. This exhibition, “De Wereld van Cor Blok,” was set up in the building of the Noord-Hollands Archief, and showcased the work of a Dutch artist and art historian who is best remembered for the covers he drew for the Dutch editions of The Lord of the Rings. The exhibition included some of his illustrations for Tolkien’s work, as well as maps and drawings of his own fantasy world Barbarusië, collaged and painted works that had never been exhibited before, and selections from his one and only comics work, The Iron Parachute, which Blok completed when he was 82 years old. This retrospective had been intended to honor the artist in 2020, but the festival and the exhibition were postponed due to the pandemic, and sadly Cor Blok died in 2021 before the exhibition came about. The exhibition was fascinating to see because it showed work in a great range of styles while also tied together by a consistent character. In addition, Blok’s work also simultaneously had an old fashioned quality harking back to the late 50s/early 60s when his Tolkien illustrations first appeared while also feeling fresh and timeless.

   The exhibitions of the Stripdagen were open for the 10 days of the festival (or longer in some cases, like Swarte’s Ode to the Book). However, the opening times were a little confusing, since especially the galleries kept their own hours,  mostly being open during the weekends of the festival, but with more hit and miss times on weekdays. As a result I found myself in front of a locked door when I tried to visit “Schaduw over Holland,” a joint exhibit by Guido van Driel and Milan Hulsing, drawing on their most recent graphic novels. Other exhibitions I had to miss due to time constraints included “Storm in de Geest,” which featured the world-building of the Pandarve, a fantasy world created by Don Lawrence and Martin Lodewijk which can be enjoyed in the series Storm, and also “De  Klaagzang van de Verloren Gewesten,” an epic fantasy series set in a medieval Celtic kingdom, written by Jean Dufaux and originally drawn by Grzegorz Rosinski. By all accounts, these exhibitions capture the theme of this year’s edition of the Stripdagen exceedingly well.

Both festivals offered a number of attractive publications related to the year’s festival and exhibitions: the FIBD has three published catalogs, for Goscinny, Mizuki, and Blain, as well as poster sets. Stripdagen Haarlem offered a catalog for the Joost Swarte exhibition “Ode to the Book”, a tie-in magazine called Wereldbouwers (world builders), which put a spotlight on the theme of the festival and the various featured artists, as well as posters and prints (some of them signed). These were available at the relevant exhibition venues as well as at the pop-up store.

 

Barbara Postema is Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes at Groningen University, a member of the History in Comics research project, and an honorary research fellow at Massey University New Zealand. Her book Narrative Structure in Comics was published in translation in Brazil in 2018. She has contributed work on narrative theory, wordless comics, and abstract comics to Image and Narrative, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and the International Journal of Comic Art, as well as collections such as The Routledge Companion to Comics and Graphic Novels, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, and Abstraction and Comics. Dr. Postema is a former president of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC/SCEBD), and a current Member at Large of the Comics Studies Society (CSS). She is co-editor of Crossing Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies, a book series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

 A version of this essay will appear in print in IJOCA.