Comics

With more than 700 comic strip authors, Belgium has more comic strip artists per square kilometer than any other country in the world! It is here that the comic strip has grown from a popular medium into an art in its own right. Nowhere else comics are so strongly rooted in reality and in people's imagination.

Belgian comics are a distinct subgroup in the comics history, and played a major role in the development of European comics, alongside France with whom they share a long common history.
While the comics in the two major language groups and regions of Belgium each have clearly distinct characteristics, they are constantly influencing one another, and meeting each other in Brussels and in the bilingual publication tradition of the major editors.

As one of the few arts where Belgium has had an international and enduring impact in the twentieth century, comics are known to be "an integral part of Belgian culture".

© Pieter Heremans

No wonder, the the Belgian Comic Strip Center is located in the very heart of Brussels. It is housed in a magnificent Art Nouveau temple by the architect Victor Horta and opened its doors to the public on 6 October 1989. In no time this impressive museum has become one of Brussels major tourist draws. Every year more than 200,000 visitors come here to explore 4,200 m² worth of permanent and temporary exhibitions.

The museum devotes much of its space to the history of the comic strip in Belgium, with Hergé undoubtedly at the head of a group whose fame is international: blow-up drawings, three-dimensional reproductions (the famous rocket used by Tintin to travel through space), etc.