Marcel Honoree Nestor Neels was born in December 1922 in Gentbrugge, the youngest of four boys. His father was a storyteller, and Sleen showed a talent for drawing, taking weekly lessons at the academy in Sint- Niklaas. He went on to study fine arts at Sint-Lukas in Brussels, where he had the ambition of becoming a painter like the artists he admired of the Latem School - a group of expressionists working around the start of the 20th century near Ghent.
"I wanted to be a painter, but by coincidence I was asked in 1944 to be the house artist for De Standaard," Sleen tells me. "It had nothing to do with strips at that point; I had to draw all sorts of things, portraits of writers and artists, caricatures and so on. Later on they said that a strip would be a good thing, and that's where it started."
So began a career lasting 57 years, and an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the most prolific comic-strip artist in the world. Before his retirement in 2002, Sleen (a reversal of his surname, which he adopted as his pen-name) had written and drawn 217 albums featuring his comic hero, Nero, not to mention dozens of other one-off works.
"I invented it all myself - the strips, the scenarios. Nobody ever touched them," he says. "I did it all alone. There are many others, including Hergé [Tintin] and Vandersteen [Suske en Wiske], who worked with studios, with writers and colourists. But I did it all alone."
The pressure, then, to produce a daily strip must have been enormous. "When I started in 1944, there was no television," Sleen says. "People read the newspaper in a different way than they do now. My mother had to have her paper every day because there was a serial in it, and she was always dying to know what was going to happen next. I made a strip every day with two rows of panels, and always at the end there'd be a cliff-hanger, so people were hanging on for the next day's paper. I worked from day to day. Current events were woven into my scenario."
Sleen didn't even have the whole story worked out before jumping in. "I never knew at the start of a story how it was going to end," he smiles. "I knew where the action would take place, but I never knew how the whole story would turn out. I worked every day on a strip that appeared daily for three months, and when that one was done, I had to come up with another."
In the 1940s, current events came into Flemish strips in a way they don't now. "The news of the day comes into all of my strips," Sleen confirms. "People have said you can follow events in Belgium through my strips
- strikes, the royal question, political events. But the stories themselves are all fantasy, plucked from my imagination."
That's a culture that's gone, vanished even before the arrival of the instant-information age. "Times are completely changed," notes Sleen. "Artists now write well-structured stories and work on them for a year, but it has nothing to do with the news. I was making four in a year. That's the reason there are 217 of them."
The album Het spook uit de Zandstraat (The Ghost of Sand Street) was chosen for translation for its symbolic value. When Sleen started drawing, he was working in an office in that very street in Brussels, directly opposite a textile wholesaler, whose imposing building, designed by Victor Horta, is now the home of the Belgian Comic Strip Center. The office where he worked has since vanished, but just up the street, in the former home of the Presse Socialiste newspaper, is the Marc Sleen museum. It was opened in 2009 in the presence of the king (who claimed to have learned Dutch by reading Nero albums) and is so far the only museum devoted to a living strip artist in Belgium. Sleen was knighted in 1997.
"The story has come full circle," says Catharina Kochuyt, who is Marc Sleen's partner and who translated the strip into English. Sleen insists he wrote in Flemish rather than standard Dutch. The translation was "very difficult," she admits. "I read that album a thousand times over, to absorb the atmosphere, the words, to understand the comments. What you try to do is get as close as possible to the original. So for instance I made the White Sock Gang speak not dialect exactly, but instead of "hanging" they'd say " 'anging" and that sort of thing, to give the idea."
The Ghost of Sand Street is published later this month by Standaard Uitgeverij. It will be available in Standaard bookshops, FNAC and the Comic Strip Center in Brussels
Pictured: Marc Sleen with a statue of Nero outside the Marc Sleen Museum in Brussels
The only museum dedicated to a living Belgian strip artist
The Marc Sleen Museum in the Zandstraat, which opened in 2009, came about when Brussels Region decided to buy the artist's archive of more than 15,000 items. The museum is run by a trust that includes representatives of De Standaard, the Belgian Comic Strip Center, publishers Standaard Uitgeverij and Sleen.
It's a tiny space, comprising the ground floor and a mezzanine that hosts temporary exhibitions. On the ground floor, visitors are led through the essentials of the Nero canon, from its beginnings - Nero was not even the central character of the first strip he appeared in, but was soon promoted thanks to the interest of readers.
"Nero was never meant to be a hero, but he became a hero," Sleen explains. "He is a perfectly ordinary man, not the sort of hero like Kuifje [Tintin] or Jommeke."
In fact, Nero is middle-aged, tubby and balding, full of enthusiasm but not very bright. He has a son, Adhemar, who's a five-year- old genius. "That was didactic for the children: he's a sort of living encyclopaedia - small but unbelievably clever, a university professor.
Nero is in fact two personalities, the father and the son, who complement each other." The permanent exhibition, in Dutch, French and English, presents the regular cast of characters who accompany Nero on his journeys, including Madame Pheip, whose pipe-smoke can confound a man's brains, and Detective Van Zwam, who was the original hero of the first strip and discovered Nero in a psychiatric institution, where he believed he was the Roman emperor. (As a tribute to his origins, Nero ever after wore two tiny laurel leaves behind his ears.)
On the mezzanine level, there's currently an exhibition of Sleen's uncannily accurate political caricatures, which runs until 3 April. In one, Nero threatens to beat some pacifism into Stalin; in another he's bewildered as house guest Jean-Luc Dehaene (former Belgian prime minister and a gift to any caricaturist) watches himself on TV.
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