Sjors en Sjimmie
Sep. 13th, 2003 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhialtoToday I went into town and spent a lot (well actually in retrospect, a bit too much) on new old books. Fact is that I found a very big pile of reprinted "Sjors en Sjimmie" books from the 1950's and '60s. They have some historic information in them which is a very nice addition to the nostalgy of reading the stories.
"Sjors en Sjimmie" is a comic which started in 1932 as a translation of the american strip "Perry and the Rinkydinks". They were published weekly in a magazine and later published in albums - for the 1930s this was uniqe in the netherlands. In the beginning the strips were one-page gags; Longer stories were only introduced in 1950. The collected episodes in a single volume at first did not correspond to complete stories. The books were simply published after about a year's worth of episodes was collected, so sometimes it ended in the middle of a story.
When I was a kid, I found several of those books in my grandmother's attic - books which used to belong to my uncles. I have a bunch of them right now, and I think they have some collector's value.
In those days the word "racism" did not exist yet. So Sjimmie was a black boy with big red lips, earrings and he spoke crooked dutch. Nobody thought that was strange (or even that he was strange). When the strips continued in the 1970s after the original artist (Frans Piët) had retired, things were modernised a lot. But somehow the more modern strips don't have the strange appeal the older ones have.
Oh and there is also a bar in town which is called Sjors & Sjimmie. It is a horrible place. I've been there only once; maybe I'll write about that later sometime.
"Sjors en Sjimmie" is a comic which started in 1932 as a translation of the american strip "Perry and the Rinkydinks". They were published weekly in a magazine and later published in albums - for the 1930s this was uniqe in the netherlands. In the beginning the strips were one-page gags; Longer stories were only introduced in 1950. The collected episodes in a single volume at first did not correspond to complete stories. The books were simply published after about a year's worth of episodes was collected, so sometimes it ended in the middle of a story.
When I was a kid, I found several of those books in my grandmother's attic - books which used to belong to my uncles. I have a bunch of them right now, and I think they have some collector's value.
In those days the word "racism" did not exist yet. So Sjimmie was a black boy with big red lips, earrings and he spoke crooked dutch. Nobody thought that was strange (or even that he was strange). When the strips continued in the 1970s after the original artist (Frans Piët) had retired, things were modernised a lot. But somehow the more modern strips don't have the strange appeal the older ones have.
Oh and there is also a bar in town which is called Sjors & Sjimmie. It is a horrible place. I've been there only once; maybe I'll write about that later sometime.
