During my student days I helped publish a comics fanzine called Iris, and our ‘thing’ was that we enjoyed making mainstream European comics.
That is why it is doubly satisfying to be holding Peter Nuyten’s Western comic Apache Junction in my hands. Peter was a contributor to Iris back in the day, and Apache Junction is as traditionally European as it gets.
The Western takes place around 1875 and follows a US Army messenger, at a time when Apache tribes refuse to be locked up in reservations and engage the federal government in guerilla war fare. The messenger gets wounded in a knife fight and needs to seek refuge at a lonely farm.
Holly Moors has this to say about Apache Junction: “Nuyten seems to want to combine the exciting stories of Jean Giraud and the engaged, critical attitude of Hans Kresse. He is a bit too wordy in the first part of the album, and could use a good, tight script writer. That way he can focus on the art, where he doesn’t quite yet reach Giraud’s level, though he is getting there. […] Still, I have finished the album in one go, and will certainly read the second part, because this is definitely an artist to keep an eye on.”
Me, I felt the story got progressively better, and I cannot wait for the second part.
Apache Junction (part 1, 2011) is published by Silvester and cost 16,95 euro in hard cover format. More reviews (in Dutch) after the link.
On May 1, 2009, the major Dutch state fund for the visual arts, BKVB, did something remarkable. They appointed a champion for comics. This champion, Gert Jan Pos, seemed well chosen, because he took a large bag of shiny golden coins, and has been roaming the land with it since, handing out money to whatever comics artists struck his fancy. 
Jeroen Funke (illustration) won the Jan Hanlo Media Essay Award 2011, and his award winning story is in this issue. The award was given to the winner of a competition for essays in comics form about sensory perception. Funke has his regular heroes Victor and Vishnu discuss how growing up adds filters to our senses that prevent us from seeing (and feeling, smelling, tasting) what’s really there.
Peter Pontiac (illustration), an underground comics giant from the 1970s who went mainstream-ish with his autobiographical Kraut (about a father who worked for the wrong side during the war), received the Marten Toonder Award 2011 for his entire body of work. In this issue he fills the two pages of The Sketchbook Of, a recurring feature.
Awards? Awards?! Eindhoven Design Academy graduate 
You will also find: 
So it’s no surprise that she called her latest comics book Gruwelijk!, and it is full of small observations such as this strip: 
Zone 5300 has published one of the stories, a nine-pager called 
Dutch comics intendant—yes, that is an official title—Gert Jan Pos asked 57 comics artists from the Netherlands and Flanders to create abstracts of classic Dutch literature in comic form. There was one catch, each comic had to encompass the entire work in a single page.