Don’t you love a good library sale? My sister in law got me half a dozen Franka albums by Henk Kuijpers her local library had discarded. There were soem doubles but still I got seven new ones:
Franka is basically what you get if you take Tintin, make her a girl and have her take her top of at least once every story. I used to read these in Eppo, a weekly Dutch comics magazine, back in the eighties. Because unlike American children, Dutch kids can handle the occasional tit or (implied) sex scene in their adventure stories. (Eppo still exists and Kuijpers’ still writes Franka stories for it, but its audience now is mostly fiftysomething year old men wallowing in youth sentiment, but we can still appreciate her undiminished perkiness).
Kuijpers’ art style is very much influenced by Herge and the Clear Line in general, but slightly looser. Like Herge, an absolute manaiac for authenticity and getting it right. Trams, cars, planes, buildings, all these are drawn with every detail correct. The first three pages from De Vlucht van de Atlantis e.g. have Franka move from her far too hot Amsterdam apartment to Centraal Station, to take the train to the beaches of Zandvoort and it’s immediately obvious she lives near Museumplein.
Henk Kuijpers is a bit of a local boy made good: not just popular in Holland for over forty years now, but his comics have also been published in Germany, Denmark and France. He’s turning 79 this December and still writing new Franka stories. Franka herself was born in 1974, just like me, but has aged a lot more gracefully…
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