No, Flanders’ best-selling author is Merho, short for Rob Merhottein, a comic-book artist who sells 800,000 albums per year – totalling more than Huysentruyt, Meus and Aspe put together. With four new titles every year and constant reprints of the 128 albums published thus far of his popular Kiekeboes series, he is by far the most read author in Flanders.
De Kiekeboes is what readers in Flanders call a family comic, aiming at an audience from seven to 77. The stories are told and drawn in a clear, bright manner, and the characters have a direct appeal to both children and adults.
Kiekeboe is the surname of a typically Flemish family, with two parents and two children, a boy and a girl – the latter an attractive teenage daughter who is the real protagonist of the series and by far the most popular character of the cast.
Merho is considered to be the only real heir to Willy Vandersteen (1913-1990), the founding father of the Flemish comic book industry. Vandersteen is most famous for his still-publishing Suske en Wiske series (first published in English under the rather unfortunate title Willy and Wanda, later changed to Spike and Suzy). Merho, 62, considers Vandersteen to be his master: It is he who taught him almost everything he knows about the profession.
“In the late 1960s, I was studying at the Saint-Lucas art school in Brussels,” Merho tells me from his home in Zoersel, a town halfway between Turnhout and Antwerp, where he was born and raised. “All I wanted to make were plain, enjoyable, traditional comics – not exactly en vogue in the art schools of those days. Only new and different things were considered to be interesting.”
After finishing art school, Merho went to see Vandersteen, who invited him to come and work in his studio. “It was there that I really started my career as a professional comic artist,” says Merho. “His studio at the time was more or less a comic book factory, where plenty of comics were being made. When I look back at what we were drawing in those days, I think it looks terrible. But it was the best school I could wish for at the time. Vandersteen never stopped repeating: ‘It takes as much time to draw something wrong as it does to draw it right.’”
Merho left Vandersteen’s studio in 1977 and began his own comic book series called Kiekeboe. The name changed with much media fanfare just last year to De Kiekeboes to better reflect the ensemble cast and the shift from the father figure as the centre of attention.
The comic was first published on a daily basis in the newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws. “Mine is the last Flemish comic that became popular just by being published in the press,” he says. “The ones that came afterwards, like Urbanus or FC De Kampioenen, were spin-offs of television series or had a popular comedian as a protagonist.”
Merho’s penchant for dealing with all kinds of controversial subjects – not just the obvious family situations – is striking. His readers are mainly youngsters, but his work deals with serious social issues like divorce, transexuality, prostitution and even incest. “My comic can be seen as a mirror of Flemish society – as an overview of how Flemish society has changed over the past 30 years,” he says. “If I were to start over again, I’d probably make it a mixed family, with children of different fathers and mothers. That is part of children’s lives these days, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to deal with it? Only once, when I had the father of the family believe that he was fatally ill, did I receive negative reactions. But I had expected that.”
Even more typical for De Kiekeboes is its particular, rather surreal kind of humour. “I have always liked comedians,” Merho says. “My grandfather used to take me to the cinema in Antwerp, where I saw the films of Laurel & Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Later, I discovered the kind of stand-up comedians we Dutch-speakers refer to with the French word cabaretiers. There were only a few back then, like Toon Hermans, and he was from the Netherlands. It wasn’t until later that something similar took ground in Flanders as well, with comedians like Urbanus. The virtuosity with which these people play with language – that’s my kind of humour!”
It is this particular kind of humour, with an emphasis on puns and playful language, that explains Merho’s success. And it makes his comic difficult to imitate. “I publish half a page every day in the newspapers Gazet van Antwerpen and Het Belang van Limburg,” he says. “For the drawings, I have assistance. But it’s not easy to find somebody who shares my kind of humour and my way of telling stories. And I have come to realise that these two things are what makes the series popular. I have yet to meet the person who can make a complete Kiekeboes story from scratch, jokes and puns included.”
Next year, the Kiekeboes will celebrate their 35th birthday. Activities begin in December with a new book and exhibition in Turnhout’s cultural centre De Warande; both book and exhibition will focus on the relationship between Merho’s comics and the arts. “The book will be called Museum K,” he says, “a reference to Museum M in Leuven, but with K for Kiekeboes.” Museum K will be presented like a real museum, with the book as its catalogue.
“We have designed a building,” continues Merho, “with a different department on every floor: painting and sculpture, theatre and cabaret, music, architecture, even lifestyle.”
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