Tom Puss

Tom Poes
Oliver B. Bumble (left) and Tom Puss (right)
Author(s)	Marten Toonder
Current status / schedule	Discontinued
Launch date	March 16, 1941
End date	January 20, 1986.
Syndicate(s)	Oberon, Panda, Big Balloon
Genre(s)	Action, adventure, satire

Tom Puss (Tom Poes in Dutch) is a Dutch comic strip, created by Marten Toonder. Together with Hans G. Kresse's Eric de Noorman and Pieter Kuhn's Kapitein Rob it is regarded as the Big Three of Dutch comics.

Tom Poes was a funny animal comic, published in text comics format. The main protagonists are Tom Poes, a white anthropomorphic cat, and his best friend, lord Oliver B. Bumble (Olivier B. Bommel in Dutch). Because of Bommel's popularity among readers the series is sometimes referred to as the Bommelsaga as well. Toonder received many awards and honorary distinctions for both his illustrations and literary output. In the Netherlands Tom Poes is regarded as literature.

In 1931 Marten Toonder was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he met Jim Davis, a former assistant of Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, creators of Felix the Cat, who taught him some lessons in drawing comics.

On March 16, 1941 the first Tom Poes comic, Het Geheim der Blauwe Aarde ("The Secret of the Blue Earth") was published in the newspaper De Telegraaf, replacing the Mickey Mouse comic in 1941. Tom Poes himself was already created in July 1939.

The name of the character is a pun on the Dutch pastry "tompouce" and was thought up by Toonder's wife, Phiny Dick. On December 18 of that same year the series was published in the two-weekly Czech magazine Punta. After the war the stories were published in NRC Handelsblad, De Volkskrant, Ons Vrij Nederland, Revue and Donald Duck. In daily newspapers Tom Poes was published as a text comic, like most Dutch comics at the time. In the weekly magazines it was published in balloon format.