George Van Raemdonck

George Van Raemdonck (28 August 1888 – 28 January 1966) was a Belgian comics artist and painter, and is generally considered to be the first Flemish comics author. He mainly worked for left-wing, socialist and anti-fascist magazines and newspapers, creating thousands of political cartoons.

George van Raemdonck was born in Antwerp in 1888. His father, who worked as a pharmacist, also was a talented draftsman. His mother, who was French, died when George was still young. Because George van Raemdonck was gifted with some musical talent, he was sent to the conservatory to study the violin. At the same time, he started painting, and in 1903, aged fifteen, he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he was taught by Franz Courtens, and where he won the 1913 de Keyer's Prize. During those years, he already made illustrations for a number of novels and for the magazine Lange Wapper.

He left Antwerp to live in Zwijndrecht on 29 July 1909. On 12 April 1913, he married Adriana Denissen, and their first daughter Pauline is born on 21 February 1914. His second daughter Anna was born on 22 February 1916.

Because of the First World War, he fled on 9 October 1914 with his wife and child to the Netherlands, where he soon started drawing political cartoons for De Amsterdammer. In 1920 he left De Amsterdammer to commence work at De Notenkraker, where he contributed until it folded in July 1936.

Dutch writer A. M. De Jong was impressed by his work and asked him at the end of 1917 to illustrate his juvenile novel Vacantiedagen. They soon became friends. In 1922, De Jong asked him to provide the drawings for the comic strip Bulletje en Boonestaak, which was published between 2 May 1922 and 17 November 1937 in Het Volk, the daily newspaper of the Social Democratic Workers' Party, and in Voorwaarts. The author and artist regularly added references to one another or cameos of each other in the strip. The comic strip was collected in books in Dutch, with at least 66 different editions so far, and has been translated in German in 1924 and in French in 1926.

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