11 Facts About Gustave Verbeek

Gustave Verbeek was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1867, the son of Reformed Church in America missionary Guido Verbeck, of Dutch ancestry, and his wife Maria.

Gustave Verbeek grew up in Japan, but went to Paris to study art, and worked for several European newspapers, creating illustrations and cartoons.

Gustave Verbeek was noted for his expressionist monotypes, which were the subject of an article in The Century Magazine in June 1916.

Gustave Verbeek was ill for two years, and died on December 5,1937, at the Home for Incurables, on Third Avenue and 183rd Street in the Bronx, New York City.

Gustave Verbeek had been a patient there for two months.

Gustave Verbeek is most noted for The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels.

Gustave Verbeek created a total of 64 of these strips for The New York Herald, from October 11,1903, to January 15,1905.

Dan Nadel describes the strip as "quiet, subdued, and somnambulant" in character, partly because Gustave Verbeek eschewed "speed lines, stars of pain", and other such cartoon conventions.

Gustave Verbeek created a short-lived comic strip in 1910 called The Loony Lyrics of Lulu.

Gustave Verbeek's strips got republished multiple times over the years, always only a subselection however until Sunday Press Books released their complete collection.

In 2012, a remake of Gustave Verbeek's Upside-downs was published by Swedish publisher Epix.