Famous once
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Esper Postma is the son of the next door neighbours of Jack Keuss. Esper wanted to make comics and Jack gave him my telephone number. When Esper came by, I had no idea what I could do for him. He had never drawn a comic yet and i am not a teacher at all. But he was a very nice guy, and very young too (17 or so), so I promised him to write something for him. That project, a series of six 8 page stories about Dutch myths, is still under construction.
But one day Esper called me to say that he had been to a Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, and they had promised him that, if he came up with some good cartoons, they would publish it. And he would get paid for it too. He asked me if I could think up something.
I made ten cartoons about famous people who tried to repeat the thing that made them famous: Mozes, Kennedy, de Beatles, Armstrong, Hans Brinker, Bassie, Einstein, Shakespeare, Jezus and Mohammed:
We got 1000 euro for these cartoons, which meant 250 for me and 750 for Esper, and that was more than I had earned in a long time for any creative work.
Soon after that Esper started a study at the Rietveld Academy, and now he has no more time to draw comics. We only saw each other since he became an art student, and that was together with Jack, in a pizzeria. The last time we met was at Jack’s funeral. I couldn’t help thinking of writing a series of cartoons about Jack’s life & death. I don’t think that Jack’s family and friends would appreciate that, and I doubt if Esper would want to draw them. But I think that Jack would have been able to laugh about such cartoons. Maybe later.