Eppo Stripblad #10/2009
Eppo Stripblad #10/2009 is one of the first 23 fortnightly issues of the revived Eppo, a magazine that had been absent from Dutch newsstands in one form or another since the late 1980s and whose 2009 relaunch by Rob van Bavel's Don Lawrence Collection represented a genuine second chapter for Dutch mainstream comics publishing. Each issue of this inaugural volume carried the ongoing serialisation of Storm album #25, 'Het Rode Spoor', the third story produced by the post-Lawrence creative team of writer Martin Lodewijk, penciller Romano Molenaar, and painter Jorg de Vos — proving that the series could sustain itself artistically after the death of its founding artist in 2003. The simultaneous presence of Elsje, a 21st-century newspaper comic that joined Eppo from the magazine's very first year, showed Van Bavel's editorial strategy of pairing cherished legacy strips with new voices that spoke to a contemporary Dutch readership.
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Rob van Bavel had spent his teens founding the Don Lawrence Fanclub and later editing fanzines Thunder and Pandarve before deciding in 2008 to revive the Eppo brand under his Don Lawrence Collection imprint. He financed the relaunch through an advance-subscription campaign, and from 28 January 2009 the magazine appeared fortnightly, mixing long-running serials such as Storm, Agent 327, and Franka alongside newer strips. The Storm content appearing in issue #10/2009 belonged to 'Het Rode Spoor', which was serialised across the entire 23-issue 2009 run before being collected as album #25 in 2010, written by Lodewijk and illustrated by the Molenaar/De Vos artistic partnership that had taken over from Lawrence.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published 4 June 2009 by Don Lawrence Collection (publisher Rob van Bavel) as the tenth fortnightly issue of the relaunched Eppo Stripblad series that began 28 January 2009.
- Contains a serialised instalment of Storm story #25, 'Het Rode Spoor' (The Red Track), written by Martin Lodewijk and drawn by Romano Molenaar and Jorg de Vos — the creative team that continued the series following Don Lawrence's death in December 2003.
- 'Het Rode Spoor' ran across all 23 issues of the 2009 Eppo Stripblad run before being collected and published as a standalone hardcover album in 2010; it was subsequently translated into German by Splitter Verlag.
- Elsje — the precocious-girl newspaper comic created by writer Eric Hercules and artist Gerben Valkema and launched in regional Dutch papers in 2007 — became a regular Eppo feature from the magazine's 2009 relaunch, with this issue among the strip's earliest appearances in the magazine format.
- The revived Eppo was built around the pairing of heritage strips (Storm, Agent 327, Franka) and newer Dutch comics (Elsje, Soeperman, Ronson Inc.), restoring a multi-strip anthology format that had been dormant in the Netherlands since the Striparazzi era ended in 1999.
- Don Lawrence Collection (later rebranded Uitgeverij L) was itself founded by Van Bavel, who had grown up as a fan of Lawrence's work on both The Trigan Empire and Storm, giving the publisher a direct lineage to the original Eppo era of the 1970s.
- Storm originated in Eppo in 1977, created by Don Lawrence and initially scripted by Martin Lodewijk; the series became one of the most widely translated European sci-fi/fantasy comics, appearing in over twelve languages including English, German, and French.
- The 2009 Eppo Stripblad run is archived by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Dutch National Library) under application number PE 360, establishing it as part of the formal Dutch cultural record.