63 Facts About Willy Vandersteen

Willy Vandersteen was a Belgian creator of comic books.

Willebrord Jan Frans Maria Vandersteen was born in Antwerp on 15 February 1913.

Willy Vandersteen's family lived in the Seefhoek, a poor quarter of the city, where his father Francis Vandersteen worked as a decorator and wood sculptor.

Willy Vandersteen's studio lay next to a printer that produced De Kindervriend, one of the first weekly youth magazines in Flanders.

Willy Vandersteen drew pictures with crayons on sidewalks, and invented stories for his friends about knights and legends.

Willy Vandersteen even convinced his young friends to buy him crayons so he could depict the local cycling championship.

Willy Vandersteen made a few sequels to these adventures for his friends as amusement, which are the earliest preserved comics he made.

Willy Vandersteen continued to follow the work of Herge later on.

Meanwhile, Willy Vandersteen combined his studies at the Academy with his work in his father's workshop until 1935, when the market for stone decorations for houses collapsed.

In between some odd jobs, Willy Vandersteen became an avid sporter, from gymnastics over cycling to wrestling.

Willy Vandersteen's chances improved in 1936 when he was hired as a decorator for the shop and the display windows of L'Innovation, a Belgian chain of warehouses.

Willy Vandersteen rediscovered Herge with The Adventures of Tintin in Le Petit Vingtieme, but the realistic work of Hal Foster in Prince Valiant.

In 1942, Willy Vandersteen quit his job at L'Innovation and started working at the Landbouw- en Voedingscorporatie, where he illustrated some magazines.

In those years, the family Willy Vandersteen moved, this time to Wilrijk, another suburb of Antwerp.

Unlike his partners, Willy Vandersteen was later not persecuted for his part in publishing the antisemitic drawings, which were considered collaboration with the Nazis.

At the Corporatie, Willy 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.

Willy Vandersteen joined in 1943, and here his comics career really took off.

Willy Vandersteen continued publishing in Bravo, with the medieval gags of Lancelot.

Willy Vandersteen presented them with the first designs for a daily comic strip, but they put that on hold and first ordered four juvenile books from Willy Vandersteen.

Willy Vandersteen though was disappointed to see the editor had renamed the strip Rikki en Wiske instead of his suggestion Suske en Wiske, and felt that Rikki too closely resembled Tintin.

Apart from these two long lasting newspaper comic strips, Willy Vandersteen made a number of other comics in these years.

Willy Vandersteen created a number of realistic stories of about 20 pages each, where he developed his own style after starting very much as a follower of Harold Foster.

Willy Vandersteen, caught in the middle, worked a while for both, but eventually switched to the new owners of De Standaard.

Willy Vandersteen continued to work for Ons Volkske, which was now renamed 't Kapoentje for a few more months.

Willy Vandersteen worked the rest of his life for De Standaard, but contributed to the other publications of the publisher: Ons Volkske, a new newspaper supplement continuing the name of the older magazine, and Het Nieuwsblad, the more popular newspaper of the group.

Willy Vandersteen was now at the height of his productivity as a solo artist.

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

Willy 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, which started on 16 September 1948, as his masterpiece.

Willy Vandersteen was followed by Karel Boumans in 1952, who was an anonymous contributor until 1959.

Willy Vandersteen worked mainly for De grappen van Lambik, a Suske en Wiske spin-off Vandersteen created for the weekly newspaper De Bond, which ran from 24 January 1954 on.

Willy Vandersteen devoted himself more and more towards the storytelling and the initial pencil drawing, which he considered the artistic process, while the inking was more of a craft.

Willy Vandersteen spent a lot more time at documentation from this point on.

In 1953, when Tijl Uilenspiegel was finished, Willy Vandersteen created a new comical strip for Kuifje.

In 1951, Willy Vandersteen encountered Karel Verschuere, a young unemployed artist.

Willy Vandersteen hired him, and Verschuere soon became his main artist for the realistic series.

Verschuere contributed to the second part of Tijl Uilenspiegel, just like Bob de Moor and Tibet did, but his main contribution to the output of Willy Vandersteen was his work on Bessy, a Western series inspired by the success of Lassie, which started in 1952 in the Walloon newspaper La Libre Belgique.

Willy Vandersteen continued working with Vandersteen until 1967, helping with many of the realistic series Vandersteen created in these years, including Karl May, Biggles and especially De Rode Ridder.

In 1966, Willy Vandersteen finally moved back from Brussels, where he had lived at different locations since World War II, towards Antwerp, and more precisely Kalmthout, a rural village to the north of Antwerp.

Unable to produce so fast, Willy Vandersteen had to expand his Studio considerably.

Willy Vandersteen then had to reorganize the Bessy Studio and hired Jeff Broeckx.

Bastei Verlag, enamoured by the success of Bessy, asked Willy Vandersteen to provide a second weekly series.

Willy Vandersteen worked mostly on minor series like Jerom and Pats, but contributed to almost all series, including Suske en Wiske.

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

Willy Vandersteen had to deliver a number of pages each week for the newspaper supplement Pats, increased to 16 pages in 1965.

Willy Vandersteen made Karl May from 1967 until 1969, when the Bessy-studio took over the job.

Willy Vandersteen took over Biggles, which ended in 1969, when it was replaced by the jungle series Safari, inspired by Daktari.

At the start of the series, Willy Vandersteen did most of the creative work, but after a few albums he left most of the work to Biddeloo.

Willy Vandersteen continued working on it until his death in 2004.

The Studio was mainly established with the artists that joined in the 1960s, but two new artists were Erik De Rop and Robert Merhottein, who became the only artist to leave Studio Willy Vandersteen and start his own successful series.

Willy Vandersteen, liberated of the work on the daily comic, started on a comic series based on one of the novels he had read as a youth: Robert en Bertrand, the story of two Flemish tramps at the fin de siecle.

Willy Vandersteen remarried on 25 June 1977 with Anne-Marie Vankerkhoven.

Some minor or less successful series ended: Robert en Bertrand, a critical but never a commercial success, folded in 1993,8 years after Willy Vandersteen had stopped writing the stories.

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 Willy Vandersteen's passions, including the art of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Willy Vandersteen died on 28 August 1990, weakened by a lung disease.

Willy Vandersteen continued working until shortly before his death, and his Studio still continues, with Suske en Wiske and De Rode Ridder as main series.

Willy Vandersteen used a wild variety of themes and influences in his work from early on.

Willy Vandersteen made fairytales, historic series, westerns, but science fiction and many contemporary comics.

Willy Vandersteen got inspiration from the different long journeys he made, like his long trip to the Far East in 1959.

Some earliest realistic comics of Willy Vandersteen clearly show the strong influence he has had from American comics like Prince Valiant and Tarzan, but he later developed his own distinctive style.

Willy Vandersteen always strived to have success beyond Flanders, and reduced the typically Flemish character of his comics soon after his debut.

Willy Vandersteen already worked and published in French during the War, and already in the 1940s he expanded the reach of Suske en Wiske to the Netherlands with some newspaper publications, and to Wallonia and France through the publication in Tintin magazine.

Willy Vandersteen created a number of commercial comics with Suske en Wiske, starting with a touristic comic for the province of Antwerp in 1957.