Tina #37/1975
Tina #37/1975 marks the debut of Noortje Visser, the clumsy, red-headed teenage protagonist who would become the most beloved and longest-running original character in the Dutch girls' magazine Tina. The strip she launched — a weekly gag-a-day format written by Patty Klein and drawn by Jan Steeman — ran continuously under the same creative team for 41 years, a record for the Dutch comics medium. Far from being a mere novelty, Noortje gave Dutch girls' comics a fully homegrown, relatable heroine whose everyday mishaps with fashion, school, boys, and family life stood apart from the melodramatic British adventure serials that had dominated Tina's pages since 1967. The issue therefore represents the tipping point at which Tina completed its transformation from a translated British anthology into a genuinely Dutch cultural institution.
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Tina was launched on 10 June 1967 by Dutch publisher De Spaarnestad as a full-colour localisation of the British Fleetway girls' anthology, and by the time Oberon — the comics division formed from the 1972 merger of Spaarnestad and De Geïllustreerde Pers — published issue #37 in September 1975, the magazine was already the best-selling comic in the Netherlands. The immediate catalyst for Noortje's creation was the cancellation of the Sjors magazine and its merger with Pep into the new weekly Eppo, which had simultaneously wiped out two series Jan Steeman was drawing; scriptwriter Patty Klein, herself a Tina contributor since 1973 and one of the first full-time female comic writers in the Netherlands, conceived the strip specifically to give Steeman a new regular assignment. Klein drew on her own teenage memories for the character's humour, and the two creators signed the pages with only their first names — 'Patty' and 'Jan' — giving the strip an unusually personal, signature feel from its very first instalment.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Noortje Visser: Tina #37 (12 September 1975), Oberon, the Netherlands — marking the debut of what would become Tina magazine's longest-running original comic strip.
- Created by writer Patty Klein and artist Jan Steeman; the two maintained sole creative control of the strip for 41 uninterrupted years (1975–2016), a record for the Dutch comics medium for a single continuous team.
- Noortje Visser is a clumsy, red-headed high-school girl whose recurring supporting cast introduced in the strip includes her mother Marga Visser, annoying younger brother Sander Visser, and best friend Marlies, who lives on a farm.
- The strip's gag format centred on universally recognisable teenage situations — lovesickness, bad hair days, parental misunderstanding, and school boredom — making it a genre outlier among Tina's predominantly melodramatic British-origin adventure serials.
- Noortje was for many years the only gag strip in Tina magazine; early reprint collections appeared in Oberon's 'Tina Topstrip' album series (launched 1977), with a full dedicated album series not following until 1994.
- Jan Steeman came to the project directly after losing his two main assignments — 'Sjors en Sjimmie' and 'Arad en Maya' — to the Sjors/Pep merger into Eppo; Klein deliberately designed the strip to restore his workload.
- The strip ran weekly until 2005, when it shifted to a bi-weekly schedule alternating new gags with reprints; it continued in some form until Steeman's retirement in 2016 and his death in 2018, and Klein's stroke in 2018 and death in 2019.
- Noortje celebrated major milestone gags (500th in 1986, 1000th in 1996, 1500th in 2005) and a 40th-anniversary special Tina issue in 2015 featuring tribute comics by multiple Dutch comic creators.