“Holland lacks a tradition of realistic comics”

I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Hal Foster Award before Michael Minneboo posted about it last Tuesday, but it turns out to have been established in 1982, to honour people working in the margins of the comics industry. Last year’s winner was Klaas Knol, for his work with Lambiek comics shop, who is seen in the video above handing over the award to Mat Schifferstein, this year’s winner. Schifferstein is the co-owner and founder of Sherpa, a small press high quality publisher founded in 1985 which has both encouraged local talents like Bert van der Meij and Lian Ong, as well as translated new work from creators like Muñoz and Sampayo, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Sherpa has also been important as a reprint publisher, e.g. reprinting the newspaper science fiction strip Arman & Ilva (Thé Tjong-Khing & Lo Hartog van Banda), in my opinion one of the best sf strips ever created. Sherpa’s catalogue tends to lean towards a traditional sort of comic: well crafted, realistic art, proper storytelling.

Other than you might expect, this sort of comic is not very commercial in the Netherlands. Most people think of comics as, well, comic: the three panel gag strip from the newspaper, the weekly Donald Duck magazine or even series like Asterix being what most people will encouter as comics. There is a market for action-adventure comics here, but it’s dominated by translations, usually from France, with titles like Largo Winch, XIII or Thorgal.

In his acceptance speech Mat Schifferstein decries this lack of a naturalist tradition in Dutch comics. He argues that the Dutch always went more for humouristic strips than for the sort of realistic adventure strips Hal Foster is a good example of, that while even twenty years ago there were still artists like Hans Kresse or Thé Tjong-Khing creating this sort of work and finding an audience for it, this is no longer the case today. He hopes therefore that his win, with the help of “the well-oiled Lambiek P.R. machine”, will be a clarion call for attention within the Netherlands for the realistic adventure comic.

I would hope so too, as I do like that sort of comic, but I can’t really think of any current Dutch artist working in this tradition. The people he mentioned came out of the world of the newspaper strip where, just like elsewhere in the world, there’s no little room for adventure strips. As far as I know the only Dutch creators still doing this sort of strip are Minck Oosterveer and Willem Ritsier, on Nikki Saxx and Zodiak, both for De Telegraaf and both having to make do with the usual three panel space alloted any comic. They work wonders in this limited space, but it hardly compares to a Hal Foster…