Martin Lodewijk

Martinus Spyridon Johannes Lodewijk was born on 30 April 1939 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and went on to become one of the most enduring figures in Dutch comics. He left high school in 1957 and began drawing cartoons — spacecraft and pirates among his early subjects — before landing his first published piece in the newspaper Het Parool in 1959. He then built a parallel career in commercial advertising illustration while gradually deepening his involvement in comics.

His most significant achievement came in 1966, when he co-created Agent 327 with Jan Kruis for the weekly magazine Pep. The espionage-comedy series, which Lodewijk eventually wrote and drew almost entirely on his own, would occupy him for nearly five decades, accumulating credits across hundreds of issues. A particularly inventive milestone arrived in 1999 when he published Minimum Bug, an Agent 327 installment measuring just 26 by 37 millimeters — recognized as the world's smallest comic book. Beyond his own feature, Lodewijk contributed scripts to Don Lawrence's science-fiction strip Storm and served as chief editor of Eppo after its merger with Sjors.

From 2004 he took over writing duties on the long-running Belgian series De Rode Ridder, succeeding Willy Vandersteen and Karel Biddeloo, with art by Claus Scholz. He also contributed to the Blender Foundation's open-source film Sintel in 2010. His catalog across titles including Pep, Eppo, and Storm spans more than 565 credited issues through 2023.