Libelle #10/1995
Libelle #10/1995 is a weekly instalment of Jan Kruis's beloved Dutch family strip Jan, Jans en de kinderen, which has run in Libelle continuously since its debut on 12 December 1970. The strip is widely recognised as the defining comic strip of the Dutch women's-magazine tradition, presenting an ordinary middle-class family — the Tromps — as a mirror for Dutch society across the decades. By early 1995 the strip was in its 25th anniversary year, a milestone marked by a dedicated biography published that same year, and the family had recently expanded with the 1993 arrival of baby son Gertje — a narrative development that refreshed the cast and signalled the strip's continued willingness to evolve. Issues from this period therefore document the strip at a culturally resonant moment, reflecting contemporaneous Dutch social shifts through the language of domestic comedy.
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Jan Kruis (Rotterdam, 1933–2017) created Jan, Jans en de kinderen at the invitation of Libelle editor-in-chief Peter Middeldorp, who knew Kruis from his earlier work on the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Robbedoes. Kruis modelled the Tromp family loosely on his own household — daughters Karlijn and Catootje were drawn from his real daughters Leontine and Andrea — and publisher Joop Wiggers subsequently built a parallel album-collection business around the strip from 1972 onward. By 1995 the strip had been running for a quarter-century under VNU Tijdschriften's ownership of Libelle, and Wiggers's imprint issued the anniversary book Jan Kruis: de geschiedenis van 25 jaar 'Jan, Jans en de kinderen', written by Marianne de Groot, to mark the occasion.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Libelle is a Dutch weekly women's magazine founded in 1934; in 1995 it was published by VNU Tijdschriften, which had owned the title since the 1964 merger forming the VNU concern.
- The strip Jan, Jans en de kinderen, created by Jan Kruis, has appeared in every weekly issue of Libelle since its debut instalment on 12 December 1970.
- The central cast — father Jan Tromp, mother Jans Tromp, elder daughter Karlijn, younger daughter Catootje, and the philosophical red tomcat 'De rode kater' (full name Edgar Allen Poes) — was established from the strip's earliest years.
- Baby son Gertje Tromp joined the family in 1993, just two years before this issue, making him a very recent addition to the household in Libelle #10/1995.
- Oma Stien (catalogued here as 'Stien') is the mother of Jans Tromp, a recurring supporting character who emigrated to America after a failed marriage.
- Jan Kruis based the Tromp family directly on his own life: Catootje was modelled on his daughter Andrea Kruis, who was herself working as a strip artist for the rival magazine Margriet by the mid-1990s.
- 1995 was the 25th anniversary year of the strip; publisher Joop Wiggers Produkties released the biography Jan Kruis: de geschiedenis van 25 jaar 'Jan, Jans en de kinderen' by Marianne de Groot to mark the milestone.
- The strip ran to 1,139 pages under Kruis's own hand before he retired in late 1998 and transferred the series to Studio Kruis; Libelle's publisher VNU acquired the character rights at that point.
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