Dutch cartoonist Hanco Kolk goes into What Came Before the creation of various famous characters, from Romeo & Juliet to Batman, Mickey Mouse to Cinderella.
Hanco Kolk got his first comic published in the same year I was born, 1974, in legendary underground zine Tante Leny Presenteert, when he was 17. Cutting his teeth on underground and amateur zines in the seventies, also founding his own, he moved into more commercial comics work in the 1980s, his most famous creation being Gilles de Geus, “the Dutch Asterix”, on which he worked together with Peter de Wit as scenarist. These two worked together a lot, including on an actual television course on how to become a cartoonist, as well as the still running Singles newspaper comic strip. On his own, his Meccano series of graphic novels has been critically acclaimed both in the Netherlands and France.
Wat Vooraf Ging (What Came Before) is drawn in Kolk’s usual Clear Line style and starts with Romeo and Juliet, each story linking to the next on its last page. In order, these go from Romeo and Juliet to Batman, Cinderella, Mickey Mouse, Frankenstein, Dracula and finally Sherlock Holmes. In each case a lot of other characters and stories are also talked about, showing how they influence the feature creation or were in turn inspired by them.
For the most part this is going over well known territory if you know these characters, but for me at least there were still surprises here and there. Not in the least the fact that Cinderella is a story so old it has been around in one form or another since literally the Stone Age!
Whether or not these precursors were actual influences is not always knowable of course. For example, Kolk starts his examination of Batman’s origins with Pierre Picaud, a 19th century shoemaker rather than much more obvious and later influences like Zorro. And the reason he does so was because Picaud was the real life inspiration for The Count of Monte Cristo. Picaud was betrayed by his friends, accused of being an English spy for which he was imprisoned, after which his friends took his fiancee and fortune for themselves. Once he got out of jail he took revenge and murdered them, for which he got the death penalty. From there Kolk shows the evolution of the masked avenger step by step, from the Scarlet Pimpernel all the way to Batman.
This was the last comic I bought in 2024 and the first I read this year, therefore a good one to re-open this series with.
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