And now for something completely different, Hermann’s version of Little Nemo in Slumberland:
An extremely charming little series about Nick, a little boy who in his dreams goes on all sorts of adventures with the animals he saved from an evil zoo owner. An odd duck in Hermann’s oeuvre, not just for the type of story it is but also for the art making much greater use of colour as a medium. The way he uses simple, single colour backdrops for the dream sequences while the real world portions are far more cluttered and less bright isn’t something you consciously notice, but it does distinguish the two perfectly.
This was also the very first series of Hermann’s I ever read, in the early eighties when these were first published, either from my local library which was well stocked with comics or because some of it was published in an educational magazine I read at school. This was long before I really was aware comics were actually made by real people, to be honest. Once I did know who Hermann was and what his usual series were like, rediscovering Nick was a bit of a shock.
The stories were written by Morphée, a pseudonym for Philippe Vandooren, Hermann’s brother in law, the same one who got him drawing comics in the first place. As Hermann tells it, originally another artist was supposed to draw the series, but he declined. Hermann himself was the second choice: neither his brother in law nor Hermann himself at first thought it would suit him…
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