Going back home to my parents always means an opportunity to look at the secondhand bookstore there (singular, as there can be only one). This weekend was a good one. I found a nice stack of comics, as well as some other neat books.
What I found were fifteen or so Douwe Dabbert strips, an old serio-comic adventure series written by Donald Duck editor Thom Roep and drawn by Piet Wijn, one of the old grand masters of Marten Toonder’s animation and comic studio. These stories were serialised in the Donald Duck weekly magazine, which always included a non-Disney strip like this, aimed at slightly older readers, in its back pages.
On top of those is a January Jones album, barely visible under the big Goscinny/Uderzo Oumpah-pah omnibus. The latter is sort of a prequel strip to Asterix only set amongst “Red Indians” in French North America. January Jones on the other hand is a retro-adventure ligne claire strip that ran in Sjors en Sjimmie in the early nineties, drawn by Eric Heuvel and written by Martin Lodewijk, one of the Netherlands best scenario writers, who also worked on the Don Lawrence Storm series, the last issues I still needed to get I also found this weekend.
Finally, on top of those there’s a Gerrit de Jager cartoon collection of the strips he did for a newspaper about the economic recession and some normal books: Jane Jacobs The Economy of Cities, David Pearce’s Occupied City and Foch: Man of Orleans by B. H. Liddel Hart.
The box behind all this is a short comics box filled with a mere fraction of the collection of floppies I still have stashed at my parents. I spent an hour on Friday digging through my longboxed and taking out some favourite series and sequences, things I knew I wanted to keep. One of these days all of them need to be moved here, or gotten rid off. The dillemma of every aging comics collector: what do I want to keep, what can I live without.
No Comments