Dear friends, guests, fans, other… Thank you for stopping by, and my best wishes to you for the new year!

Jeroen

My best wishes!

I know I’m a bit early with my New Year’s wishes, but in a few days I’ll be off to… well… I assume by now you can guess where I’ll be

Jeroen

Date a guy who draws cartoons. He will make light of the absurdity of life. He will always look for ways to make you smile, even in the darkest of moments. He will not ignore the darkness, but will use it to his advantage. Despite his superficially cynical attitude, he will offer you a worldview which is fundamentally optimistic.

Date a guy who draws cartoons. He will show you the world through his eyes, making you see how his perception shapes his reality. He will surprise you with his unique take on life, the universe, and everything. He will help you see things in a different light (…all the things you detest, you will almost like).

Date a guy who draws cartoons. He’ll venture to lay bare the essence of things. He will find beauty in ugliness, truth in lies, and hope in desperation. He’ll find inspiration in anything you throw at him.

Especially date a guy who draws cartoons about you. He will immortalise you. Nothing will stroke your ego more than being an artist’s muse. He will, however, stop you from becoming conceited by shedding a gentle light on your less flattering qualities.

He will never hide his own less flattering qualities.

He may reduce your appearance to a handful of simple dots and lines, but will still picture you as a real human being. He will idolise you and kick you off your pedestal at the same time. He’ll make you prettier without Photoshop.

Date a guy who draws cartoons about you. He will talk to you for hours on end and pick your brain, trying to discover the essence of you. He will try to show you a you even you have never seen before. He will aspire to make you love yourself just as much as he does.

He will sometimes be brutally honest, but will be so in the gentlest of ways. He will not use humour as a weapon, nor as a shield, but as a pillow. Sometimes he will challenge your views. Even if he agrees with you, he will feel obliged to play the devil’s advocate, in order to make you rethink your predispositions.

He will question everything, except for how important you are to him.

And he will always, always love you.

It’s basically just become a mausoleum, a shrine of rememberance for A Comic That I Used To Draw. And that’s what it’s going to stay until I come up with something new. I can’t just throw it all away now, can I? Besides, without doing anything at all, I’m still attracting a fairly steady 300 to 400 (and sometimes more) visitors a day. Isn’t that something? And, last but not least, there is also a certain muse who claims she still returns to look for new stuff every day. Hi sweetie!

Anything, for lack of anything better, let me just give you a small update about myself. I’m still quite busy with all sorts of cartooning assignments. What a contrast to the start of the year when I almost thought I might have to close down business. It’s weird how that goes: first nothing, and then a bunch of new jobs at the same time. Makes my bank account happy So yeah, I’m still busy, but pretty soon I’ll make a nice little cartoon specially for all of you, promised!

Hugs,

Jeroen

Once again, many many thanks to Coral, who again spared no effort to turn it in a truly lovely, beautiful book!

Indidently, I finally bought that new iPad, meaning I can finally read the iBooks myself (didn’t work on my first gen iPad…). That’s been a most interesting experience. Thanks to the combination of new technology and an aging memory, it feels like I’m often reading these comics for the first time. In other words, I’m sort of discovering them the way you probably once did :-)  Funny how they’re sometimes odd, embarrassing, or downright ‘what the hell was I thinking?’ awkward. But most of the time they’re just genious, of course

Warm greetings,

J.

(Not that you’ll notice that much of a difference on this poorly neglected site… )

J.

So yesterday one of my best friends, Jo, visited the Belgian Comic Strip Center, together with his girlfriend Ann and a few family members. The visit, including a guided tour, was a gift from Ann for his 40th birthday (yes, another one bites the dust…). Jo is a really big comic book fan, so it seemed like a fun idea for a nice day out. Nobody told him it was a TRAP.

Because little did Jo know that Ann had contacted me some time ago with a very special request. She had asked me to draw a caricature of the both of them, which – in further conspiration with the nice people of the museum – would be put up on the wall, next to all the other, uhm, works of art. And so this is what he got to see at the end of the tour:

For those of you who don’t speak Dutch, this is what it says:

“Dearest Jo, do you want to marry me?”

“Of course. But you don’t have to kneel down for that!”

“I’m not kneeling down, I’m standing up.” 

That’s right, this was her devious way to propose to him! Confronted with such surprising originality, Jo of course had no other choice but to say YES. Har har.

Best. Cartoon. Assignment. Ever! :-)  The best of luck to the both of them!

(By the way, in case you didn’t get that, the kneeling joke refers to her eh, limited height.)

Jeroen

The story mentioned on the museum’s website

Here are two I recently made, and again I need to apologise immediately for yet another pair of Flemish inside jokes…  I promise that pretty soon I’ll try my hand on a global celebrity – suggestions are always welcome. But now, without further ado:

Recognisable enough? The guys at the newspaper didn’t think so. These were turned down as well. Oh well, keep on practicing…

Jeroen

That’s right, I’m 40! Or at least, I will be tomorrow, because as I’m writing this, it is still yesterday (for you) but I will schedule this post to be published tomorrow (for me), meaning today for you. You see how things get less complicated as you get older?

Forty… sounds pretty special, doesn’t it? Friends and colleagues have been teasing me with it in recent days, but to be honest, I really don’t mind. Actually, I believe 40 is an age that suits me well.

So hell yeah man, I’m ready for it

Jeroen

It’s pretty topical here in Belgium – it’s past half of May, and it’s still a miserly 12 degrees (C) here, cold, grey and rainy. It’s supposed to be a sunny 20 by now! But it could be worse. In the evening news, I saw it was snowing in Portugal and Spain. What the hell?

I hope the weather predictions are wrong and the real spring will return later this week. Got a big birthday coming up on Thursday…