Gr’unn!

A can’t miss bargain to be had at De Slegte in Amsterdam right now: copies of Gr’omnibus, a treasure trove of sequential art from Groningen, the Athens of the North; an invaluable treasure now yours for only two euro fifty! Why you should bother? Because you get to sample some 40 odd (some very odd) Dutch (as well as the occasional furreign) cartoon talents, culled from the pages of one of the most consistent of Dutch underground comix zines, G’runn.

Most foreigners might be forgiven for believing there’s not much more to the Netherlands than Amsterdam, Den Haag and perhaps some pittoresque village like (ugh) Volendam, with Zeeland thrown in for free for our German friends who tend to encamp on the beaches there each summer in a more benign re-enactment of the Maydays of 1940, but there are other interesting cities in the rest of the Netherlands as well, even up North. Groningen (Gr’unn in the local dialect) is one of them, a university town big enough not to be overwhelmed by it with a decent local art scene and nightlife, a city in which over the years a thriving alt-comix scene has been established.

In 1996 a few of them started Gr’unn, which since then has published a lot of up and coming cartoonists. People like Barbara Stok, Mark Hendriks, Amoebe, the Lamelos collective, Marcel Ruijters, Reinder Dijkhuis, Berend Vonk, all had strips in Gr’unn. And as such it helped establish, together with Zone 5300 and more amateur zines like Impuls or Iris, the first generation of cartoonists neither interested in going the traditional comics route of magazines or newspapers, nor in consciously rebelling against this, but who just went their own way.

Any anthology of a comix zine celebrating its ten years anniversary will always be uneven and of course Gr’omnibus is this as well. Some of the cartoonists are better or more interesting than others, while there’s a huge mix of styles and subjects represented as well. But there is common ground as well. Autobiographical or fantasy, stick figures or obsessive crosshatching, what most of the stories and artists present have in common is a prediliction for the light ironic and the cynical, short gag stories but with a twist of bitterness and not too much emotional investment. It’s a style of writing I quite like, though it can be a bit wearing in large doses. No real masterpieces here, but still more gems than dross and no real bad stories either.

So if you’re in Amsterdam and you want a cheap way to sample a huge chunk of the contemporary Dutch comix scene, go get Gr’omnibus from de Slegte. It’s in the middle of Kalverstraat so even tourists should be able to find it.