Marc Sleen

Marcel Honoree Nestor (ridder) Neels (30 December 1922 – 6 November 2016), known as Marc Sleen, was a Belgian comics artist. He was mostly known for his humorous adventure comic The Adventures of Nero and Co., but also created gag comics like Piet Fluwijn en Bolleke, De Lustige Kapoentjes, Doris Dobbel, Oktaaf Keunink and De Ronde van Frankrijk.

Sleen was one of the most celebrated comics artists in his home country. His work is admired for its absurd and sometimes satirical comedy, as well for the fact that he worked completely singlehandedly without any assistance for 45 years on end, a feat that landed him a spot in The Guinness Book of Records in 1992. (This feat has been surpassed since by Jim Russell's The Potts, which ran for 62 years.) He was one of the few comics artists in Belgium who had a museum dedicated to his work.

Biography

Marc Sleen was born as Marcel Neels in Gentbrugge, near Ghent. He studied drawing in Ghent. During the Second World War he was imprisoned by Nazi soldiers in Fort Breendonk because his brother worked for the resistance. He was tortured and put in the death cell, but saved by the fact that after D-Day the officers moved all the prisoners to a different prison, where he could escape. In 1944 he started to work as a political caricaturist in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard. He also contributed illustrations and short comics for the newspaper and the youth supplement, and made illustrations and his first comics for the magazine Ons Volk. He was also a courtroom sketch artist for a while.