Hanco Kolk was one of the last Dutch cartoonists to follow a sort of “traditional” career path in comics. Born in 1957, getting sucked into comics as a child and not putting them away when getting older, starting drawing himself, continuing to do so, actually submitting work to a proper comics zine and getting published, doing some work for the Dutch Donald Duck (something of a finishing school for young talented cartoonists for decades) in the early eighties, switching over to working for Eppo, aimed a slightly older kids and where you could do more and actually get credits for your work, getting a few strips under his belt, often working together with Peter de Wit and doing pretty well, culminating in their signature series Gilles de Geus, a historical comedy strip set in the time of the Dutch War of Independence and which in a better universe would’ve been as big a success as Asterix. He and Peter de Wit also did some work for television, including an actual series on how to become a cartoonist in the early nineties. Hanco Kolk seemed destined for a pretty good career doing humour strips for the comic mags and other children’s magazines but something happened in 1993.
That something was Meccano. Set in a fictional city state equal parts Monaco and Sarajevo the series is a cynical look at war, love, society and religion, all done in Kolk’s new style of not quite Clear Line drawing. Each album in the series stands on its own and the second album, “Gilette” is one of the best Dutch comics of the past twenty years. None of them have been translated in English unfortunately, but luckily there is a website.
One of the few Hanco Kolk books that has been published is Club Paradise, part comic, part sketch book, some extracts of which can be found above. Club Paradise is the story of Kolk’s badly timed trip to New York to attempt to break into American newspaper comics or, as he puts it “Exactly one month after nine eleven I decided it was the perfect time to go to New York and sell my comics to newspapers”. That doesn’t work out, he has to spent his time somehow and he ends up drawing people in a sleazy nightclub called “Club Paradise”. There’s nothing more to the story, but it’s the art that makes it worthwhile. Kolk is a master at using just a handful of lines to set down a character, with faces that don’t need noses or ears or sometimes not even anything but a smile, some eyebrows and hair to create the impression of a lap dancer or a hulking security guy. It’s the art of leaving things out, paired down drawing while keeping his lines fluid and elegant. Interspersed with this clean, warm art are the sketches, often in blue ballpoint, much more wiry and dirty, but still with a hint of the elegance of his finished artwork.