A bad actor

I don’t want to post this.

I don’t want any hassle.

I just want to draw.

I used to hold the title of Comic Artist Laureate of The Netherlands, an important ambassadorship for Dutch comics and the Dutch comics community.

I entered that community in 1999 - a small scene of about 150 people, united in that one crazy passion of throwing lines on paper and hoping others deem it entertaining. It felt like coming home: these were my peeps! Creative, funny, introverted (until the second beer) and above all, nice.

Comic artists are nice people.

Comic artists don’t like conflict. All we really want to do is draw. We don’t want to start a fight, not even with people who conned us. We shrug it off, we think “it’s all in the game” and we move on. We need our time and energy for comics.

Some people take advantage of this.

Even worse: some people seem to relish playing the bully. You want your money? Oh, boohoohoo, why don’t you sit in a corner and cry? You’re republishing your work with another publisher? Oh, guess what I’m selling at that con, that’s right, your old work! And I’ll send buyers your way to sign it too!

This comic depicts just one incident of the behavior of a certain Dutch publisher. There are many more (and worse!) documented instances of malpractice, harassment and threats from this person.

Unacceptable.

This needs to stop.

In many other professions, there is an inbuilt moral code that members of that group hold each other to. When one greengrocer in the marketplace is behaving unethically, other vendors will let him know that he is not welcome there anymore.

The Dutch comics community lacks such a moral safeguard. When a bully enters our scene, he can have a field day with all the publication-hungry, conflict-avoiding people he finds there. And we as artists are just too nice to fight back, or even get vocal about it.

Part of me does not want to do this.

I don’t want the hassle, I just want to draw.

But another part of me is still that ambassador, still that young comic artist coming home into a world of likeminded, nice people. And when some bully harasses my peeps, I need to do something.

So I drew this.

My intrepid and ethically sound publisher Seb is on the case and stands up for “his” authors. What can we do? Well, it starts with this comic, which will be published in the next issue of StripGlossy.

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If you’re in the Dutch comics scene, you probably know who this is about. If you’re not, I hope you enjoyed this peek into one of the dark corners of our very small community. This sort of bullying behavior happens everywhere (even in politics these days, I’ve been told) - but that doesn’t mean I have to stand for it.