Anton Hermus
Monday, 11 May 2009
I will not bother you too long with thoughts about my half hearted attempts to make a living as an illustrator thirty years ago, but in the box that I mentioned yesterday I also found some drawings that I made for Anton Hermus. Anton Hermus, Mr. Buitenhuis and Jos Corstjens were the first persons who inspired me to be creative. I am very thankful for that.
Anton Hermus died a few years ago. When I was sixteen I started a correspondence with him. He published a private magazine about Tintin, called “Het Brilliantinepotje”. It was one of the weirdest zines I ever read, so when he asked me to make some illustrations for him, I gladly did that. Here is a cover that I made for issue#8:
In 1982 he wrote a little book about his rather paranoia ideas about Tintin, which was published by Horus:
He asked me to do some illustrations for the book. I have only three or four of them left, but I am sure I made at least a dozen. Not all were used in the book.
When Anton Hermus died, his brother Frank sent me a box of cassette tapes that he though I might wanted to have. He also send me six cassettes with recordings that Anton had made during the legendary Queensday of 1980. Anton walked though Amsterdam amidst the riots, with his portable cassette recorder on “record” whenever he thought it was worth it. These tapes are an interesting document, that I long should have made into mp3’s.
Here is a short excerpt of one of the tapes. It is a recording of a teargas attack of the police:
.