On this very day, Flanders’ most popular comic strip characters, Bob & Bobette, also starring as Willy and Wanda or Spike and Suzy (in Dutch: Suske en Wiske), celebrate their sixty-fifth anniversary, yet they haven’t aged a day in all those years.
They have remained the same age, they never went to school and they still drive a variety of vehicles without any licence whatsoever.
Several generations of children grew up with their adventures, making Bob and Bobette, among other things, an interesting source for research into Flanders’ postwar cultural history.
The first story of Rikki and Bobette appeared in the Flemish newspaper De Nieuwe Standaard on 30 March 1945, just before the end of the war. Willy Vandersteen (1913-1990) had already published his first comic strips in the early forties. Legend has it that the first depictions of Bobette and the spinster Aunt Sidonia (also referred to as Agatha or Sybil) came into being in an air raid shelter in Antwerp with V1 and V2 bombs flying overhead.
In a second story, the author made Rikki vanish for being too old and looking too much like Tintin, and had Bobette meet Bob on the island of Amoras (An Island Called Hoboken). The inventor Barabas made his first appearance in this album as well and was joined in later years by the softy bully Lambik (Ambrose, Orville) and the intrepid superhero Jerom (Wilbur). Many years later the Dutch market-orientation made the heroes no longer fly Sabena but KLM and Bob eventually played football with Orange, not the (Belgian) Red Devils.
The characters in Bob and Bobette are not tied to time and space: while cars and furniture are changing around them, they remain the same age. Lambik and Aunt Sidonia will never marry, although the latter will remain forever in love with him.Even now their creator is dead, they live on. The adventures of Bob and Bobette are translated into many languages such as Afrikaans, Chinese, Swahili, Tamil and…Latin. In that venerabe language they have names as Lucius and Lucia, whereas Lambik is called Lambiorix. On the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, The Low Countries Yearbook published this article.
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