You may know that Ligne claire/Clear Line was a term coined by Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte to describe the artwork of Herge and E. P. Jacobs, a style that was enormously popular in Franco-Belgian comics up until the sixties, combining strong colours, an uniform thickness of line and cartoony characters with realistic, detailed depictions of things like cars, planes and other machinery. It was appropriated in the late seventies by Swarte and others like him (Theo van den Boogaart in the Netherlands, Yves Chaland, Ted Benoit, Serge Clerc et all in France) to provide an ironic contrast between the definately adult stories they wrote and the seemingly innocent, straight forward art style, long since coded as belonging to childrens’ comics.
In the Netherlands however this resurgence in Clear Line artwork went further than just as an ironic fad. New generations of artists in the late seventies and eighties rediscovered the style as perfectly suitable for straightforward action stories, the most successfull being Henk Kuijpers, who with his Franka series produced arguably the most popular Dutch comics series of the eighties, not hindered by his habit of getting his heroine to take her top off.
Eric Heuvel is another of these Clear Line cartoonists, perhaps the best one currently active in Dutch comics. He started his aero adventure strip January Jones together with Martin Lodewijk, veteran scenario writer, in the early nineties and restarted it a few years ago, when the biweekly comics zine Eppo was resurrected. He’s one of the magazine’s most popular writers and at normal comics cons in the Netherlands there’s a huge line waiting for his autograph or sketch. At the Dutch Comic Con though, the Eppo audience wasn’t quite there, which meant I only had to wait a short time to get the sketch below and got to talk to him about his love for aeroplanes. I love his work and I love the January Jones series for having a no-nonsense, capable woman as its protagonist without any of the bagage that sometimes brings with it.
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