Marten Toonder

Marten Toonder
Marten Toonder (1972)
Born	May 2, 1912 Rotterdam, Netherlands
Died	July 27, 2005(2005-07-27) (aged 93) Laren, Netherlands
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Dutch
Genre	Graphic novels

Marten Toonder (May 2, 1912 – July 27, 2005) was a Dutch comic strip creator, born in Rotterdam. He was probably the most successful comic artist in the Netherlands and had a great influence on the Dutch language by introducing new words and expressions. He is most famous for his series Tom Puss and Panda.

In 1931 after his final exams, Marten Toonder went to Buenos Aires with his father. Here he got acquainted with the work of the well-known Argentine artist and editor Dante Quinterno, who ran a studio producing comics. Quinterno's creations impressed him to such a degree that he decided to become an artist himself. His most famous comic series were the Tom Puss (Tom Poes in Dutch) and Oliver B. Bumble (Olivier B. Bommel in Dutch) series that appeared in a Dutch newspaper from 1941–86. It has a very characteristic format. Every day there were three drawings and an accompanying text (about a book-page long). It started out as a children's cartoon, but gradually became more relevant to adults. Nowadays his texts are considered literature to some critics, and Toonder received several literary prizes for them. He invented many new words and expressions and some of those are now widely used in the Dutch language. Many personalities in his comics have their own peculiar dialect of Dutch, for instance Prlwytzkofsky language of professor Prlwytzkofsky, an innovative mixture of Dutch and German. Because of his specific writing style, so far, it is difficult to translate. His drawing style is very detailed and might be compared to Pogo, with more room for background drawings, since there are no text 'balloons' in the drawings. Apart from his eccentric use of language Toonder is also praised for satirical approach.

Toonder was born in Rotterdam on May 2, 1912. He lived in Ireland from 1965 until the early 1990s. He was married to the cartoon artist Phiny Dick (1912–1990), who collaborated with her husband and on whose earlier created characters Ollie B Bumble and Tom Puss were based. In 1996, at the age of 84, he married the composer Tera de Marez Oyens, who died the same year. Together with his brother, author Jan Gerhard Toonder, he assisted his father, (Captain) Marten Toonder Sr., a seaman born in the Dutch northern province Groningen, to write a book about his life, in which Toonder Sr. describes many details about the ending era of professional cargo sailing, the Rotterdam Lloyd (Line to East Indies), the Holland America Line and about pre-war Rotterdam. Marten Toonder died in his sleep on July 27, 2005.