Wednesday, 31-July-2024


Brussels is a city of comic strips.

All across the city there’s murals large and small, on building corners and alleyways and walls and blank spaces. Many are homages to various famous Belgian comic strips, most that I don’t recognize, but all of which I appreciate for the warmth and color that they bring to the city.

There’s even a whole museum dedicated to them – one that, of course, I made a major point to include in my adventures!

While it was under construction, the fun of the museum wasn’t dimmed in the slightest – It was quite warm, I’ll admit, but I powered through the sweltering heat to appreciate the view into the European side of comics.

It was really neat – definitely a very different view of comics than I’d seen before. Focused on more older comics, with literally nothing pertaining to super heroes or even a veiled reference to “golden age” or “silver age” from the United States. This museum, unsurprisingly, focused on Belgian comics – but also discussed the various genres and overarching ideas of comics.

It was definitely interesting, but I feel that it lost out on quite a bit of important context by ignoring the world as a whole, in favor of one small subset. Art is always influenced by itself, and I’d have loved to learn how European comics were influenced by American artists, and vice versa… I still enjoyed it, though, and left with more knowledge in my mind (and quite a few more questions that I enjoyed learning about on my own!).