Bulletje en Boonestaak


Bulletje en Boonestaak was one of the first very successful Dutch newspaper comic strips, the first Dutch comic moralists, and the first Dutch comic translated into other languages.
It ran from May 2, 1922 until November 17, 1937 in the Dutch papers Het Volk and Voorwaarts, drawn by the Flemish artist George Van Raemdonck, who had moved to the Netherlands as a war refugee in 1914, and Dutch writer A. M. de Jong.
The comic appeared in 1924 in German translation and in 1926 in French as well. A Dutch comics award for contributions to the development of Dutch comics, the Bulletje en Boonestaak schaal is named after this comic.

Characters and story

The contents are the adventures of the boys Bulletje and Bonestaak, the former short and sturdy, the latter thin and tall, who accompany their fathers, captain and coxswain on the ship "Herkules" on a very long trip, but those adventures were told in a socialistically engaged fashion. The comic was controversial as the stories contained for instance nudity, fighting, vomiting and the use of bad words.
Later editions were often censored, swimming trunks were added and parts of the story were cut. For instance, the beating of the stars of the comic of a concurrent newspaper with different political views in episode #1 and the begging, mutilated World War I veterans in episode #2 were cut from the story in the 1949 edition.

Episodes