Monday, March 17, 2014

Sweet Marion

Monday Marion Day.

I am up against a deadline for a book I have written about the Dutch comic weekly Pep. This week I will be showing a full story of the Dutch early sixties soap opera strip Marion by Jan Wesseling and Thé Tjong-Khing. Khing is known in Holland for his work on the sf strip Arman and Ilva in the seventies. I will show some of that later. He is of Indonesian descent and a master at using the brush. he went on to become one of the major Dutch children's book illustrators, but his talent is already visible in the strip from the early sixties.

Officially he was assisting illustrator Jan Wesseling, but at this stage in the strip most of the work seems to be Khing's. Marion was produced by the Toonder Studio's, who were better now for their allegorical animal strips Tom Poes and Panda, both of which were a huge success all around the word (excluding the US, of course). But they did produce realistic strips as well. Marion was one of their big hits. It was part of a group of European soap opera strips that were all heavily influenced by Juliet Jones and other strips like it. In France, François Gillon (check him out) doing something similar.

Apart from the fact that the lettering is hideous, this is a very well made strip and I am glad to share it. I could do this, because the Dutch Royal Library has opened it's files for online access and my friend and colleague Alex van Koten pulled the scans and compiled them. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did.

3 comments:

Diego Cordoba said...

Ger, I think you mean PAUL Gillon, and not François, for those who are looking for any information on this excellent french artist.

Gillon is one of the only artists I know who also worked on a gigantic format as Foster did (both using sheets nearly a 1 metre tall to draw their strips)

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Of course. I wish I had access to one of his newspaper stories.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

And I found some, which I will share.