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  • Cover 'Araya'
    Cover 'Araya'
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    Araya
    Powerful themes in simple drawings
    Hebban

    Araya moves from Belgium to Thailand to go live with her mother. In simple black-and-white drawings, the semi-autobiographical ‘Araya’ paints a complex portrait of a young woman struggling with her bi-cultural identity, her sexuality, the relationship with her mother and her self-image.

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  • Cover 'The Barflies'
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    The Barflies
    Minimalist with strong dialogue. Simply extremely powerful
    De Stripkever

    Two strangers at a bar become embroiled in a philosophical discussion about belief, disbelief, science, truth and God, while the bartender acts as a peacekeeper.  Ben Gijsemans’ minimalist linework gives us little more than talking heads and the bar with the three characters. ‘The Barflies’ is a remarkable book about conviction, faith and self-image, and ultimately also about persuasion.

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  • Cover 'Bungalow 5'
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    Bungalow 5
    His most powerful graphic novel to date
    Guido

    In 1950s Hollywood, Newland Archer and May Welland are the glamour couple du jour. But Newland soon discovers that he’s not entirely immune to the charms of one of May's male friends. With ‘Bungalow 5’, Maarten Vande Wiele breathes new life into ‘The Age of Innocence’ by Edith Wharton. 

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  • Cover 'The Churchgoers'
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    The Churchgoers
    A book to cherish. A highpoint of the year
    Enola

    In this moving and sometimes funny dual coming-of-age story, Ben Gijsemans presents us with extraordinary page compositions that offer a wonderful insight into the relationship between Harold and Carl. The two brothers want only the best for each other, but burgeoning hormones disturb the harmony between them. A magnificent portrayal of the tension between child and adolescent in the 1990s.

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  • Passages
    Passages
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    Passages
    Beautiful minimalism. Visual tai chi
    De Standaard

    In ‘Passages’ Martha Verschaffel interweaves four mysterious stories. Are there any connections between them? Is there a single main narrative? Or is that just the interpretation you favour as a reader?

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    I Have Travelled Far, But Won't Stay Long
    An atmospheric, melancholic graphic novel about growing up in the nineties *****
    NRC

    Gus is in his thirties when he returns to the village where he grew up. Cas and his friends are in their final year in school, balancing on the cusp of adulthood, and can’t wait to get away. Ward Zwart shows himself a master of low-key yet telling images and detailed facial expressions, rendered fully in pencil. It’s the poetry of small things that, more than anything, speaks loud and clear in the work of Zwart and Smits.

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  • Cover 'Madame Catherine'
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    Madame Catherine
    A high-class adaptation ****
    Knack

    After her house in Paris has burned down, killing her lover, Madame Catherine moves to her country home, where she begins to be consumed by nightmares. A presence watches her, follows her, and touches her in the night. Catherine gradually loses her mind. In this idiosyncratic version of ‘The Horla’ by Guy de Maupassant, Maarten Vande Wiele ably allows suggestion to do its work.

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  • Cover 'Maelstrom'
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    Maelstrom
    Breathtaking and stylistically stripped down
    Metro

    A fascinating wordless adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known short story ‘A Descent Into the Maelström’. Hudréaux has gone for a free interpretation in ninety-nine etchings that swaps the sense of oppression in the original for a broader, more atmospheric depiction. An intriguing and beautiful graphic novel.

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    Your Inner Dog
    Like an empathetic etcher Casaer goes in search of the canine side of human nature
    Stripgids

    In 'Your Inner Dog' a man wearing a dog mask tells a series of different characters what kind of dog is inside them, and what that means, carefully analysing their flaws and innermost secrets. Casaer knows how to identify any sensitive issues, move the reader and even make them laugh out loud at times. A real gem that delves deep into the human psyche.

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  • Cover Soap
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    Soap
    Barbie meets the Dynasty-vixens.
    De Morgen

    Glitter, glamour, love, jealousy, intrigue, tears and above all lots of pink: this is Maarten Vande Wiele at his best. His elegant, black brush strokes give playful expression to a world he clearly adores: that of 'Dynasty' and other vintage soap series.

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  • Cover The Tramp
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    The Drifter
    Maarten De Saeger confirms his status as a top talent.
    Cutting Edge

    In order to run away from her worries, Ines moves to her late grandfather’s farm in the Ardennes. One day a tramp appears on her doorstep who introduces himself as John. Ines offers him a bed for the night, but it soon becomes clear that the wandering eccentric is not in any great hurry to leave.

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  • Cover Wolves
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    Wolves
    The poetry of triviality
    Cutting Edge

    Ward Zwart and Enzo Smits evoke the atmosphere of endless boredom in which teenagers sometimes find themselves. Zwart creates fabulous things with a pencil. His dreamy and accurate drawings of joyless details and gloomy faces create a slightly nostalgic universe.

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  • Cover Weegee
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    Weegee
    Sublime, sketch-like artwork by Mannaert, with sharp dialogue
    Metro

    The American Weegee’s street photographs made him world famous. Wauter Mannaert and Max de Radiguès turn the photographer into a man of flesh and blood and make you identify with him, so his rather tragic fate hits all the harder.

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  • Cover - My Funeral
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    My Funeral
    A graphic novel that truly gets under your skin
    Flanders Today

    Arnon, a guy who flitted from one romantic conquest to another before his death at a young age, looks back at his brief life. One by one, Maarten De Saeger tells the story of various people who played a role in his life. Gradually it all comes together to form a mosaic that does not present Arnon in the best light.

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  • Cover - El mesias
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    El Mesías
    On the threshold of master craftsmanship
    Enola

    El Pocero, a filthy rich estate agent, loses everything overnight when the property market collapses. And Marinaleda, a Spanish village organised as a cooperative, is led by an extremely left-wing mayor. ‘El Mesías’ tells, in uninked pencil drawings, the tale of people who are searching for something, in a story that actually keeps hope alive.

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  • Cover Sugar
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    Sugar
    A born storyteller
    Enola

    ‘Sugar’ is a comic story about life as seen through the eyes of a cat. In masterfully drawn black-and-white pictures, Serge Baeken juggles with the narrative structure and page layout in this quirky and appealing graphic novel.

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  • Cover - Mad With Joy
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    Mad With Joy
    The best comic of 2014 ****
    De Standaard

    In a loose, fluid and sketch-like style, Joris Vermassen draws a story based around important themes: saying goodbye, things coming to an end, disappointment and grief. And yet ‘Mad with Joy’, like the statue of the same name, is an ode to life.

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  • Cover What We Need To Know
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    What We Need To Know
    A coherent and bittersweet meditation on family foibles
    Comicsalternative.com

    Karel, Valère and Roger are three brothers who each need to come to terms with their own demons. Reading about their troubled lives, we get a sense of just how cruel and thankless as well as enchanting and hilarious the world can be: extremes we have no choice but to accept.

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  • Cover Midgard
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    Midgard
    Steven Dupré has given his unbridled imagination free rein.
    Actuabd.com

    Steven Dupré is a craftsman: his assured, very natural drawing style is of the highest quality. In addition, as a scriptwriter the author has mastered the art of taking his readers with him to a parallel universe, by means of subtle, profound stories.

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  • Cover Paris
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    Paris
    This is a no holds barred trash graphic novel.
    The Comics Journal

    Vande Wiele has illustrated a knowingly ridiculous yet loving portrayal of a world he clearly adores, bringing an elegant black line to the page as he pays tribute to the most superficial of the brilliantly superficial.

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  • Cover - Dance by the Light of the Moon
    Cover - Dance by the Light of the Moon
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    Dance by the Light of the Moon
    A powerful look into the complexities of the human heart and prejudice *****
    Comic Heroes Magazine

    An enjoyable, flowing and exceptionally readable graphic novel about the author’s relationship with a Togolese political refugee. The story consists of two parts, in which we see the same relationship from two different perspectives. The visual narrative is vivid and follows a rhythm that matches the story perfectly.

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  • Cover - Years of the Elephant
    Cover - Years of the Elephant
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    Years of the Elephant
    Linthout’s choice to leave his pencil-work bare, is a masterstroke
    Blog Critics

    Willy Linthout has created a powerful, groundbreaking graphic novel that grabs the reader by the throat. From the very first page, he draws us into the difficult processes that await Charles as he lurches between loneliness, grief, incomprehension and love, often losing sight of the difference between reality and fiction. 

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  • Cover Over to You
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    Over to You
    As you read the stories you sometimes have the feeling that you are looking in a mirror.
    Rifraf

    A graphic novel that reacts to the here and now and is set in our modern multicultural society with all its pros and cons. 'Over to You' is also inextricably linked with Antwerp, the city where the Comic book artist and the scriptwriter have lived all their lives.

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  • Cover The Second Kiss
    Cover The Second Kiss
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    The Second Kiss
    A human story without corniness, with an overdose of emotions and identifiability
    De Morgen

    Although this graphic novel begins as a classic boy-meets-girl story, the tone quickly becomes less cheery. Author Conz chose a visual narration with a limited amount of text, but a great richness of imagery. His dark, expressive pages perfectly fit this loaded story about characters whose past keeps catching up with them.

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