Trip Down Comic Memory Lane

art58koen
12 minutes ago
3 min read

Back in the Stone Age, uh, the very early 1960s, when I was just a tiny kid, I’d noticed that everybody in my family loved reading, which fascinated me a lot.

Unfortunately, whenever I looked into those books, there were only meaningless scribbles, which at 4 years of age, I couldn’t read yet…

However, there were also books and magazines with pictures, lots of them, and those were much more interesting. Despite the scribbles, those images were fascinating, and I could more or less follow the storyline or use my imagination and make up some kind of narrative. Unnecessary to say this was heavy shit for a 4-year-old!

Those comic books/magazines were a very important part of my early youth, stimulating my thirst for stories and adventures…

In those days, there weren’t that many comics available, 2 weekly magazines (Donald Duck and Sjors), but at least our newspaper had a couple of black and white comic strips (e.g. Suske & Wiske*) which were something I looked forward to every day.

One particular aspect of Dutch comics then was the format, 2 or 3 pictures with 2 blocks of text underneath, e.g., the Tom Poes, Kapitein Rob, and Eric De Noorman strips.

At my father’s family house, there were lots of those old comic books in various states of disintegration, but this didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. Especially the covers of some of those books were fabulous!

They also had a weekly ‘magazine collection’ which was subscription-based and exchanged weekly for newer editions!

This included the Dutch version of Tintin Magazine: Kuifje, which had comics in color, even more exciting, of course.

Living in a small village in the Dutch countryside wasn’t particularly interesting or exciting, until one day I accompanied my Mom to the local drugstore…

To my surprise, tucked away there in a corner was a comic book stand, but with completely different comics.

These (American translations, of course, but I wasn’t aware of that) featured Illustrated Classics (Huckleberry Finn, a.o.) and more spectacular, super-heroes (Fantastic Four, a.o.), which was even more awesome!

After this visit, I decided to check those out by myself as my Mom would never buy any…

And off I went on this adventure, sneaking into the drugstore, grabbing a comic, and hiding behind the stand.

For a little while, I could indulge in these amazing stories, until suddenly the owner’s voice (Mr. van Rossum’s) called out loud: “Mr. Olie, are you going to buy that comic book?”

Sheepishly, I admitted that I had no such intention, whereupon he told me to leave the premises as his shop was not a library…

Even so, I think that for a while, at least once a month, I sneaked back into his drugstore!

I don’t think I ever managed to finish a story from beginning to end, but it was good fun while it lasted.

Back in 2025, while searching for new materials to use in my Art For Art’s Sake series, I stumbled upon an old comic from the 1960s called Magnus Robot Fighter, which somehow seemed familiar.

I downloaded a couple, and the No. 8 edition in which Magnus battles a giant robot gave me one of those deja vu-like moments; suddenly, I was back in that corner of the drugstore, looking at exactly that issue!