Sigmund #1

History

The character originated not on the page but on television: De Wit sketched out the concept of a cynical psychiatrist during a 1992–93 Teleac educational series on comic-strip drawing that he co-hosted with longtime collaborator Hanco Kolk. Sample strips had already appeared under the working title Mensch, durf te leeven in the small-press magazine Razzafrazz (October 1992), and a short run under the Belgian title Mijnheerke Psi in Het Laatste Nieuws was dropped because readers found it too cynical. De Volkskrant initially rejected De Wit's submissions before finally publishing the strip from 2 January 1994 — but early reader complaints nearly ended it again; De Wit wrote to Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker for advice, and Walker's feedback — that Sigmund should leave his office more — gave the strip the creative room it needed to grow. De Plaatjesmaker, the Amsterdam publishing house that De Wit co-founded with Kolk in 1988, collected those first newspaper strips into the debut album in 1994, with the imprint handling the series through 1997 before De Harmonie took over ongoing publication.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Creator and sole author: Peter de Wit (born 10 March 1958, Beverwijk), veteran Dutch cartoonist previously known for De Familie Fortuin and, in collaboration with Hanco Kolk, Gilles de Geus.
• The album collects the inaugural run of the Sigmund daily strip from De Volkskrant, which launched on 2 January 1994 — the paper's only regular homegrown comics feature at the time.
• Publisher De Plaatjesmaker was co-founded by De Wit and Hanco Kolk in 1988; it issued the first Sigmund albums (Eerste Sessie through at least Derde Sessie) before De Harmonie assumed the series.
• The strip's protagonist — named as an explicit nod to Sigmund Freud — is a diminutive, one-eyed psychiatrist whose gags lampoon self-help culture, therapy culture, New Age trends, consumerism, and human folly in single-tier, black-and-white sequences.
• Before its De Volkskrant debut, the character appeared in prototype form in the Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws under the title Mijnheerke Psi (1993), but was cancelled there for being 'too cynical.'
• Sigmund: Eerste Sessie won the VSB Publieksprijs in 1995 (awarded 7 June 1996), the Dutch public-voted comics prize — the first major award recognition for the series.
• The Eerste Sessie album reached at least a third printing (3de druk) by 1996, per Michigan State University library records, indicating strong early demand.
• The strip later spawned a 2005 spin-off, Burka Babes, which was translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Czech, and a 2011 long-form graphic novel, Het Lege Nest ('The Empty Nest'), extending the Sigmund universe beyond the daily gag format.

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