This weekend I am at the Dutch Comic Con, where I will be awarded a special prize for my contributions to Dutch Comics. Mostly as a journalist, editor, translator and promotor, because i saved my writing abillity for my career in television. Lately I have been doing more and more comic projects, though. Some of there are based on unsold or too expensive television ideas. De Jongens van de Witt is such an idea. Developed for television with my regular co-writer Harm Edens, it was our attempt to do a comedy about Holland's seventeenth century, the period of out greatest wealth and succes, of Rembrandt and Frans Hals and the Tulip boom. The main characters are Johan and Cornelis de Witt, the first, Johan, was the most intelligent man of his century, the inventor of the mathamatic system upon which insurences are built and for a while Holland's first 'prime minister'. The other, his brother Cornelis, was er... not the brightest guy of his century. In Holland they are best know for the way they died, put in jail and ripped apart by an angry mob. BUt in our series, we took them when they were in their early twenties, living together in Amsterdam and hoping to make it big.
When I got in touch with Luca Salvagno, I realized I had an opportunity to take this idea and turn it into a strip. Luca has been Italian artist Benito Jacovitti's colorist, assistant and finally he was the one who ook over Jacovitti's succes strip Cocco Bill after he died. Luca rendered my characters in a modern version of Jacovitti's style, which fits the 17th century very well. We set out to do a four page story for the Dutch quarterly magazine StripGlossy and it was recieved very well. We are currently making one page gags and hope to sell the strip in as many countries as we can. Since our chances in the US are slim (Who still does funny comics anyway?!) I can show it here. Since I write most of my comics in English ans translate them into dutch afterwards, it was easy to do an English version. I hope you like it as much as I do.
1 comment:
Interesting history and strip! Congratulations!
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