Joost Swarte

I posted some Yoshitoshi prints recently and I was explaining that, oddly, they reminded me of Hergé.

Now I've found Joost Swarte, the brilliant Dutch comic creator / designer / architect, who seems to have claimed the place of Hergé's spiritual heir, but in a gently subversive way... He has adapted the famous "clear line" style (a term actually coined by Swarte to describe Hergé's style) to comment ironically — and oh so colourfully! — on human relationships and the artificial environments we modern men and women now evolve in.

These charming, cheeky illustrations really are a delight!

I think the appeal of this kind of graphic style is that it is rich enough to effectively and poignantly represent our daily reality, but also manages to tame it at the same time... It functions much like a French garden or a well tended public parc — both of which use natural elements to create a serene artificial environment for people to enjoy, all at once celebrating "nature" but also crucially removing its harsh, threatening, overpowering character.

In Swarte's drawings, the anxiety-provoking confusion and messiness of life is brought under control by the even lines and the reassuringly contained flat colour fields. One feels he is exorcising the anxiety of everyday existence by projecting it into this humorous, exquisitely ordered toy world — and that all the viewer needs to do to find solace is to follow him along on a leisurely stroll through his perfectly ordered garden.