12 Facts About Dutch comics

In 1858 the Swiss comic strip Monsieur Cryptogame by Rodolphe Topffer was translated in Dutch by JJ A Gouverneur as Meester Prikkebeen and was a huge success in the Netherlands.

Dutch comics drew several humoristic scenes in sequential form and wrote the text beneath the pictures.

Early example of a Dutch comics magazine was Kleuterblaadje published in 1915 and had a weekly comic strip, often translations and even plagiarism from foreign language magazines.

Dutch comics created a comic strip called "Thijs IJs", which was a substitute for Rupert Bear after the newspaper lost the publication rights.

The most successful and productive Dutch comics studio were the Toonder Studio's, renamed as such by Marten Toonder in 1945, who both made comics as well as animated cartoons, already during the war years.

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Exemplary of this, is that Toonder's current literary publisher De Bezige Bij, Holland's most important purely literary publisher and for decades now Toonder's literary publisher, exclusively reprints Toonder's text Dutch comics only, dismissing all his latter-day balloon Dutch comics for Revue and Donald Duck magazines, including Tom Poes, as being outside, what they consider, Toonder canon.

Text Dutch comics consist of a series of illustrations with a block of text underneath the images telling the story.

The other long-time survivor, Tina, was sold by publisher Oberon to Finnish media conglomerate Sanoma who changed the formula of the magazine from a purely comic magazine to a hybrid, featuring articles and editorials of interest to the teen-age girl target group with Dutch comics now occupying a subordinated place, and succeeded in making the magazine more relevant for modern girls.

Illustrative of the Dutch comics magazines losing their place in the "leesmap", were their circulation numbers; Sjors and Pep had circulations of 156,172 and 128,824 copies respectively in 1974, Eppo featured a sharply reduced circulation of 197,069 copies in 1977 one year into its existence.

However, it was as equally a popular format for the publication of pulp Dutch comics as released by not only Classics Lectuur, but by such publishers as De Schorpioen, De Vrijbuiter and Baldakijn Boeken, particularly in the Crime, War, Western, and, for the girls and to a lesser extent, Romantic genres, which were predominantly created by anonymous Italian, Spanish or British studio artists.

Tex Willer, whose original release run was executed in a slightly larger dimension with slightly sturdier softcovers for the express purpose to differentiate them from the pulp Dutch comics, has made a recent come back nonetheless, but now in the bonafide album format.

Nowadays the Dutch market is fragmented: there are always the imports, the small press circuit, the reprints, the online comics and Donald Duck and whatever is the latest rage for kids.