May 1 was the day Robert Schuit started a new cartoon blog at—guess where?—cartoon.blog.nl. Schuit, who draws cartoons himself under the name Bandirah, managed to convince a jolly band of artists to join him, among which ‘big’ names such as Argibald, Michiel van de Pol and Humor de Nar (illustration).

24 Oranges started more than 2 years ago with an entry about the new cartoon blog clogwork.net, which is still alive and populated by the slightly older cartoonist.

(Illustration: cartoon.blog.nl, by Humor de Nar. Caption: “To think there are people who spend their Friday nights all alone.” Link: Sargasso.)

Last Wednesday famous cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants got a tulip named after him in the Keukenhof flower garden. Under the watchful of eye of many a young fan and the great big yellow sponge himself, the flower got baptized with perfectly good champagne by Nickelodeon presenter Patrick Martens.

It took grower Jan Ligthart from Breezand 18 years to develop the tulip, writes De Telegraaf (Dutch). Presumably that time was not spent exclusively on this new tulip, as many companies have already paid the man to do the same. Ligthart told the paper it would take four years for the bulbs to arrive in Dutch stores: “The first bulbs are for the US, because they pay better abroad. It’s as simple as that.”

(Photo of a totally unrelated yellow tulip by Hisa Fujimoto, some rights reserved.)

Two Dutch artists who draw political cartoons using mainly words and symbols to make their point have been making a name for themselves recently: Trik and Gorilla. The former won the prestigious Inktspotprijs 2007, the award for the best political cartoon, with a drawing commenting on the stalemate the Belgian government formation suffered last year. Trik used the famous last panel of the hugely popular Flemish Suske and Wiske comic strip, a powerful symbol for Belgium among Dutch readers, in which Wiske breaks the fourth wall by winking at the reader over the words The End. In Trik’s version, Wiske was dead. The End?

Gorilla is a group of designers making cartoons for the front-page of daily De Volkskrant. Readers can can vote for their favourite cartoons and buy T-shirts of the cartoons they like at the newspaper’s website. Caption for this cartoon: “Dutch best prepared for climate change.”

The wordiness of the cartoons of both artists, and the use of puns makes the cartoons feel rather like the mysterious Loesje posters that started turning up on walls all over the country during the 1980s, and that contained such witty observations as “there’s always a little bit of month left at the end of my budget.”

Paul Faassen is a cartoonist who juxtaposes techniques to make a point. I came across his work yesterday when I was reading an article in the online Volkskrant when something in the accompagnying cartoon (no longer available) drew my eye. It took a second but then I realized what it was: the faces of the two men men in the image were drawn fairly realisticly, but the rest of their bodies was sort of sketched in. The drawing reminded me most of connect-the-dot type drawings, where some details are already filled in. But instead of dots there had been empty space, which the child-like artist had filled in.

The rest of his cartoons are like that too. The artist has used the connect the dots idea before, though in reverse: a fully naked man is looking down at his erect … well, what is? Connect the dots and find out (NSFW?). From a photo taken at a beach of a father carrying his son, the father has been erased; the subtitle suggests that the father was a Jew. (“Daddy, am I also one of the chosen ones?” the son asks.) And then he takes it even a step further, and uses an immediately recognisable stereotype of the emancipation of graphic design: a man at cocktail party has had facial surgery, but things didn’t come out quite right; the face is all stretched out. Faassen obviously achieved the effect by using the stretch tool in Photoshop. Says the man in the cartoon: “Did it myself! On the computer!”

Clogwork.net features cartoons, comics and illustrations from a collective of known and lesser known Dutch and Belgian artists. Whereas comics and cartoons are associated with kids in many parts of the world, Europeans tend to take their doodles very seriously and rightly so.

The site features works by Nozzman, Roel Venderbosch and Sevensheaven (here below).

(Caption: Very fertile year for wild boars)
(The guy bending over is the world-famous French cartoon character Obelix.)

To look up these artists and many more, the famous Dutch comic book store Lambiek has a whole collection of artists in their Comiclopedia as well as a nice history of Dutch comics. They sell a whole bunch of things as well.

There’s always the Comic strip fair on 24-25 February in Rijswijk, where you can meet the makers of Fokke & Sukke and ask them about their recent English books.

(Link and illustrations: Clogwork.net)