Eppo #13/1978
Eppo #13/1978 is a representative weekly instalment of the Dutch anthology that was the central home of Uco Egmond's back-page gag strip featuring Eppo, his antique-dealing companion Ouwe, and their large black-and-white dog Pineut — the very trio whose popularity was so immediate that the magazine itself was renamed after the strip when Pep and Sjors merged in 1975. Running continuously as a back-cover feature, the Eppo gag strip was the signature identity of the Oberon weekly throughout its first decade, and issues from 1978 document the series at its creative peak before Egmond handed art duties over to a substitute in 1983. The trio's comic dynamics were influential enough that several gags were later adapted for the Donald Duck weekly, demonstrating the characters' reach beyond their original weekly home.
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The Eppo strip was conceived by Uco Egmond, who debuted the gag format in the Dutch weekly Pep in 1974; when publisher Oberon merged Pep and Sjors into the new anthology Eppo in October 1975 — an initiative developed by Martin Lodewijk and editor-in-chief Frits van der Heide — the strip migrated with it and anchored the new magazine's back cover. By 1978 the weekly was in its third full year of publication, appearing as a 52-issue annual run; Egmond was simultaneously developing other work (his De Leukebroeders collaboration with Peer Coolen had begun in 1976), but the Eppo strip remained his primary flagship feature throughout this period. The 1978 editorial staff documented at Lambiek included a small team under Oberon/VNU's youth-publishing umbrella.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Oberon (the youth-publishing arm of Dutch media conglomerate VNU) as part of the third full annual run (1978) of the weekly anthology magazine Eppo.
- Contains a gag strip instalment by creator Uco Egmond featuring the three catalogued characters: Eppo (bespectacled boy protagonist, typically drawn wearing a beige sweater and driving a Citroën 2CV), Ouwe (mustachioed antique dealer), and Pineut (large black-and-white dog).
- Packaged with a Hoempa-Pa! mini-booklet supplement (Part 1) — a black-and-white insert series distributed across multiple 1978 issues; Hoempa-Pa! was a Goscinny/Uderzo strip that had originally appeared in the Belgian weekly Kuifje (1958–1962).
- The Eppo gag strip was the magazine's back-page feature from the first issue in October 1975; the magazine's own name was derived from the strip, underlining the characters' central role in defining the weekly's identity.
- Creator Uco Egmond (born Eindhoven, 1948) studied industrial design at TH Delft before beginning his comics career; the Eppo strip became the best-known work of his career, running to approximately 500 individual gag pages before he stepped back in the mid-1980s.
- Five collected albums of the Eppo gag strip were published between 1978 and 1982, with the first two albums ('In de puree' and 'In de bocht') both appearing in 1978 — the same year as this issue.
- In 1978 the magazine also began simultaneous publication in Indonesia, where it ran until 1980, expanding the reach of the strip and its characters beyond the Netherlands.
- Gag storylines from the Eppo strip — including running jokes built around Ouwe's antique shop mishaps — were later adapted into strips for the Dutch Donald Duck weekly, demonstrating the cross-media cultural footprint of these characters.
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Stef wordt ontvoerd door buitenaardse robots.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).