Jef Nys, 1927-2009



Jozef "Jef" Nys, the Belgian cartoonist best known for the strip Jommeke, has died according to a rash of newspaper reports from the Flemish region in which his creation was hugely popular. He was 82 years old.

Nys was born in Berchem in 1927, where his family had located after living in coastal regions before World War I. The future cartoonist had three siblings, two of which died at an early age. His father died while he was a teen. Nys was initially influenced by his maternal grandfather, who painted part-time, and by the Disney Studio movies. At the age of 11, he began evening art classes, and at age 13 he began to prepare for live as a technical engineer. In 1943 he began study at the Royal Academy of Arts of Antwerp. He supported his studies with work at an animation studio.

Nys' first comics camed at the weekly satirical newspaper 't Pallieterke, where he served as a kind of jack of all trades. He was refused employment at the Disney Studios in 1947, and spent the early part of the '50s doing a number of isolated comics works and fulfilling his military obligations. His first series was a comedy-adventure during this period called Kadodderke.

His life's work Jommeke enjoyed a modest start in 1955 as a gag comic for the Catholic newspaper Kerkelijk Leven, for whom he would later make a number of more realistic-looking religious-themed anthologies. That initial burst of Jommeke comics ran for three years and were collected into books, along with other work he was doing at the time. In 1958, Jommeke moved to the daily Het Volk and became a story-strip, with two strips a day feeding 44-page stories. Through most of the 1960s he made Jommeke comics and continued to do fill-in work on other serials and launch supplementary features of his own. By the 1970s, he had focused much of his attention on his most successful feature. By the late 1970s, over two million copies of Jommeke books were selling each year, and initial printings of new works were in the six-figure range.

It was also in the 1970s that Nys began to farm some of the Jommeke work out to other creators, first in terms of additional inkers, then to artists and writers, work that eventually scaled back as the feature fell from the absolute height of his popularity. He was still contributing work to the feature shortly before his death.

It is estimated that the over 200 albums in the Jommeke series sold over 200 million copies, and there are statues of Jommeke in Middelkerke and Temse. Although translated into French early on and into English and German periodically, he enjoyed the vast majority of his success in his native country. Nys was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the Strip Turnhout Festival in 2005, the same year the Centre Belge de la BD celebrated the international aspects of the character with an exhibition. For generations of children born in the geographical region of Flanders, Nys remains one of the great cartoonists who ever lived, and his creation a rite of passage for many young readers.

A 248th album, Jommeke, Fifi Kampioen, is due by the end of the month.


 
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