Although I briefly attended an art academy, drawing began as little more than a hobby. My first loves were photography and writing, so it felt almost inevitable that I would try to bring image and text together.
At the time, my closest friend was a painter with very strict ideas about realism. I still remember our discussions vividly. I have never been particularly fond of the color green, and I would find myself staring at one of his perfectly composed landscapes, unable to resist asking, “Couldn’t that green of the grass be just a touch less green?”
He would take it almost as a personal insult, pointed at the canvas, and looked at me reproachfully. “That grass is exactly that green in real life.”
We spent a great deal of time together, even taking the occasional trip to the grand city of Paris. But on those days when I couldn’t afford film for my camera, I would sometimes pull out a humble box of watercolors instead. I rarely showed him the results, and when I did, his opinion was, predictably, not particularly generous.
As a photographer, I was already used to thinking in series, so it didn’t take long before I started a cartoon sequence called Humpel & Stumpel.
The series followed two quintessential Amsterdam canal-side entrepreneurs, thoroughly unpleasant characters, I should add. I have always had a soft spot for such types. Not in real life, but certainly in my imagination.
As the header image suggests, I also created a full first page of the comic strip. A newspaper was interested, but I had to deliver one episode weekly and it took me at least two days to complete one page, so I switched to one-image cartoons above. If you want to see the full page, you can click here. (NSFW)
Not all originals were available, Nano Banana did a fairly decent job at restoring them from old Xerox photo copies.