April 30th - Agent 327

A Year in Comics - April 20th

Olga Lawina & Hendrick Ijzerbroot - Agent 327

Martin Lodewijk was born on May 1st 1939 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  He was a sickly child, forced to spend much of his time at home, where he started drawing to keep himself busy.  In 1957, Lodewijk broke off his secondary education, choosing instead to become a comic artist and comic writer.  He immediately managed to sell his work, and in his first two years he drew a dozen space-related comics as well as half a dozen of pirate comics for a publisher.  In 1959, his breakthrough came with Frank, the Flying Dutchman, written by himself but drawn by Piet Wijn, but soon after he abandoned comics, becoming an advertising illustrator.

In 1965, Lodewijk made his return to the world of comics, starting with the James Bond and Get Smart-inspired spy parody comic Agent 327, which became an unexpected success.  The comic evolved from four-page gags to full-album adventures in 1968.  At the same time, Lodewijk also wrote scripts for colleagues, while continuing to work in advertising.  In 1976, he became the chief editor of the new Dutch comic magazine Eppo; two years later, he received the Stripschapprijs, the highest honour within the Dutch comic strip world.

Around the same time, Lodewijk began a long-standing collaboration with the English comic artist Don Lawrence, who had only recently completed his run on the sci-fi epic The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire.  Together, they created the science-fiction series Storm, to which Lodewijk's friend and colleague Dick Matena would also contribute as a writer (Matena would later replace Lawrence as an artist on the series after he lost sight in one eye, following complications of a cataract operation).  Another collaboration he started around that time was the comic January Jones, with Eric heuvel.

In 1983, Lodewijk unexpectedly stopped with his comic-related activities, fully concentrating on his advertising work.  However, 17 years later, in 2000, he once again returned to the world of comics, first with new albums of Agent 327, before writing the scripts of albums 207 to 235 of Willy Vandersteen's legendary series The Red Knight.

For his comic work, Martin Lodewijk was made a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on April 29th 2011.

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