While 2010 is already at its second month and we are looking forward to what this year will bring, 2009 also was a year of a lot of things. Among other less pleasant events, 2009 was declared Year of the Comic in Belgium. With the fame of Belgian comics in the world, this should not be so surprising. In honour of the ninth art, we review for you the Comics Museum in Brussels.

Tintin is without any doubt the most well know and famous Belgian comic character. The worldy adventurous travelling journalist by the hand of Hergé is well represented at the museum.

The place is not precisely badly chosen. All of the most famous Belgian comics and their history are represented in an impressive Art Nouveau venue by architect Victor Horta (The Musical Instruments museum, the Horta House,...) at rue des Sables, 20. Characteristic of the style is the bright daylight that shines through the glass ceiling. When entering, you pass the Horta Brasserie to your right and the comic’s shop Slumberland to your left. In the big hall, you are drawn to the big marble stairs. Once on the stairs, you will have already passed the rocket Tintin ‘flew’ to the moon with, a Smurf and Asterix. Upstairs, space dressed Tintin, Captain Haddock, Calculus and of course faithful dog Bobby are greeting you.

So are statues the only thing you get? Of course not. On the first floor, you can see the process of making a comic, in a manual and authentic fashion. Further on, you are presented by some animated cartoons and techniques to make them. I remember watching fragments of animated Vandersteen’s ‘Suske en Wiske’ (Spike and Suzy in the US, Willy and Wanda in the UK, Bob & Bobette in French) as a kid and spinning a wheel with drawings of horses, which when spinned made the successive still images look like an animated cartoon.
Upstairs, you can sit in professor Barabas’ Time Travelling Machine, pretend eating waffles like Nero, stick your head through a painting Captain Haddock wise or sit in Gaston Lagaffe’s messy office.
You may now wonder if they are worth a museum. After all, aren’t comics for the children? Firstly, in my opinion, it is worth having a museum for the characters, but more importantly for their authours. Hergé, Vandersteen, Edgar P. Jacobs (Blake and Mortimer), Peyo (the Smurfs), Franquin (Marsupilami), they are all there. A lot of them are among the first ones to have adopted the ligne clair, or ‘clear lines’, a style of drawing that uses clear strong lines of uniform importance. Those beginnings are represented by some original copies of Tintin Magazine, the journal where it started for a lot of followers of that Brussels School.
Should you feel you have a lack of knowledge on all this figures, both authors and characters, you can dive into the library and read as much as you want. The library hosts the largest public collection of comics titles, so there’s something for everybody. To read, you can get comfortable in the reading room.
Entrance to the museum, which is open from 10AM till 6PM from Monday till Friday, will cost you 7.5 EUR. More information, also in English, at www.comicscenter.net. |