Can stereotypical housewives in Flemish family comics divorce? The cases of Jommeke and De Kiekeboes

For decades the best-selling comics in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, have without any doubt been the so-called familiestrips. In this article, I probe the Flemishness of this particular type of comics book (or ‘album’). Since there is a lot of confusion, I explain at length why ‘family comics’ would be a more suitable English translation for this term than the more obvious and more often encountered ‘family strip’ (which better suits the Dutch-type familiestrip). The article’s other objective is to explain why not only the Zeitgeist, but also the very format, of the Flemish familiestrip has made it difficult to broach the topic of serious inter-family conflicts such as marital problems among protagonists. I will demonstrate this by focusing on the stereotypical housewife characters of what could be considered Flanders’s two most ‘basic’ familiestrip series: Jommeke (for c. 7 to 10 years old) and De Kiekeboes (c. 10+). With the help of two thematically comparable albums about the mothers in the respective families, I will show how their creators have tried to deal with the tricky topic of marital problems – and, related to that, the emancipation of women – while still respecting the Flemish-type familiestrip format. Together with an elaboration on how Jommeke originated and how De Kiekeboes has changed its focus in the new millennium, the analysis of the albums shows what is possible within the rather strict but nevertheless evolving ‘rules’ of the Flemish familiestrip, and what is not possible with respect to inter-family conflicts in Flanders’s by-far most successful kind of comics.