15-01-2010 om 14:27 by Sueli Brodin

My daughter Naomi was very excited when she came back from her friend Meg’s home yesterday afternoon and the first thing she said was: “Meg’s father has ALL the Suske and Wiske comics at home!”

As far as I can tell, Meg’s father is far from being an exception: many Dutch fathers seem to keep entire collections of the popular Belgian comics at home.

My son Tim was the first of our three children two years ago to discover the Suske and Wiske comics at school and he was immediately hooked. He would read them at every opportunity. When he went through the school’s collection, he started borrowing the comics at the local public library. The following step was to start buying them himself with his pocket money and ask them as birthday or Sinterklaas presents.



In the meantime, his sister Naomi has caught the Suske and Wiske bug as well and reads nothing else.

The comic books are lying all around the house. There’s even one on my desk right now. My children own more than a hundred books and the pile can only keep growing because a new book is added every few weeks to the more than 300 existing ones. My children read them from dawn to dusk, tirelessly and over and over again. They know all the titles they’ve read by heart, can quote entire dialogues and describe their favourite stories in full detail.



The comics tell the fantastic adventures of five friends: a boy and a girl named Suske and Wiske, Wiske’s aunt Sidonia, and their friends Lambik, Jerome and Professor Barabas. Not to forget Wiske’s doll, Schanulleke.

The original strips date back to 1945 and were the creation of the Belgian comics writer Willy Vandersteen. Since the characters speak Flemish, my children have integrated Flemish expressions into their vocabulary, most notably the sophisticated sounding word “nochtans” (“nevertheless”).



There is a special complicity between Tim and Naomi, and all the other Suske and Wiske readers among their school friends. They laugh at the same jokes, comment on their favourite adventures and draw the various characters. And we inevitably bump into these same friends at every Suske and Wiske event in the region, such as the Suske and Wiske musical last year in Heerlen, the recent Suske and Wiske film at the cinema or the current Suske and Wiske exhibit at the Limburgs Museum in Venlo, which we visited during our winter holiday.

We climbed straight up to the exhibit on the fifth floor and my children’s attention was immediately caught by a large lit table where drawings of the various comic figures were being projected for anyone to copy. There were plenty of sheets of paper and pencils and my three children hurriedly grabbed a seat and proceeded to create their own Suske and Wiske strips. They could have stayed there for hours.



To be honest, I’ve never been much of a comics reader myself. I think I only read my first Astérix at the age of 18… In this sense the exhibit in Venlo was a true eye opener for me, not only in the world of Suske and Wiske, but especially in the art of comic strips.

The exhibit laid a special focus on the historical and educational value of the many adventures described in the books, where the characters regularly travel through time thanks to a special time machine invented by Professor Barabas and get to meet and interact with famous historical figures such as Rembrandt (De Nachtwachtbrigade) or Peter Stuyvesant (De stugge Stuyvesant).



I was fascinated to discover that the depictions of historical settings, famous paintings, clothes, instruments, machines were very often strikingly accurate. I learned that in “De mysterieuze mijn”, where the storyline takes place in a mine in Belgian Limburg, the illustrator actually first visited a mine and precisely reproduced in his drawings the working clothes of the miners, the large digging machine and the type of lamps that he had seen.



Another interesting panel showed that a chronological analysis of the Suske and Wiske comics revealed much information about the technological development of instruments such as the telephone or the radio over time.



What I enjoyed the most at the exhibit was to learn about all the visual tricks used in comic writing, which can actually come in very handy in our digital world of communication via email, Twitter and Facebook… I’m referring of course to the clever use of fonts, sizes, interjections, onomatopoeia, signs, symbols and spaces to express not only a wonderfully rich pallet of sounds and emotions, but also more abstract notions like intensity, duration or speed.



In any case, it is obvious to me that my children have already integrated many of them in their everyday speech. They seem to understand each other perfectly well when they say things like: “Hey look! KRIOOING! BONK!”

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