Detective Van Zwam
| Detective Van Zwam | |
|---|---|
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | Standaard Uitgeverij (Belgium) |
| First appearance |
The Adventures of Nero: Het Geheim van Matsuoka (1947). |
| Created by | Marc Sleen |
Detective Van Zwam is a Flemish comics character in the Belgian comics series The Adventures of Nero by Marc Sleen. He is a brilliant detective and able to find clues by even the tiniest of evidence.
Van Zwam was originally the main protagonist and the series was named after him, but after ten stories his more popular sidekick, Nero became the main protagonist instead. Since then Van Zwam was recast as a side character.
In 1945 Willy Vandersteen's comics series Suske en Wiske was a major success in Flanders. The newspaper De Nieuwe Gids asked their political cartoonist Marc Sleen to create a comics series of their own to compete with Suske en Wiske 's popularity. Thus Sleen thought up a series centering around a smart detective, Van Zwam. The name was an idea of journalist Gaston Durnez, who based it on the Flemish dialect verb "zwammen" ("to talk bollocks").
Van Zwam made his first appearance in the very first The Adventures of Nero story "Het Geheim van Matsuoka" ("Matsuoka's Secret") (1947), making him the oldest character in the franchise. Nine albums long the series was named after Van Zwam, but he was eventually pushed aside by the popularity of his sidekick Nero, who also made his debut in "Het Geheim van Matsuoka". Readers responded more enthusiastically to Nero than Van Zwam, thus making him the series' hero from "De Hoed van Geeraard de Duivel" ("Geeraard the Devil's Hat") (1950) on. Van Zwam's appearances became less frequent from that moment on, though he still remained a good friend of Nero and a major protagonist within the cast. In some stories, such as "De Verdwenen Nero" ("The Disappeared Nero") (1979), "De Terugkeer van Geeraard de Duivel" ("The Return of Geeraard the Devil") (1983) en "De Gelukbrenger" ("The Luck Bringer") (1988), Van Zwam complains about no longer being the series' hero.
Van Zwam is a genius detective who always carries his magnifying glass around. He is able to detect significant details about people just by inspecting a cigarette butt that fell on the ground. In "De Zwarte Toren" ("The Black Tower") (1983) he is even able to use his magnifying glass as a rear-view mirror. In early stories Van Zwam wore a trilby, but from "De Groene Gravin" ("The Green Duchess") (1975) on he wears a Sherlock Holmes-type hat.
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