Dutch comic artist Stefan de Groot published the comic Kwab en het refrigeraat in 1994. The comic is now available in English for the first time. Stefan redrew the whole story with new text. Kwab and the Fridgedair eBook is now available on Apple Books.
Kwab and the Fridgedair eBookBuy on Apple Books!Prof. Dr. Anton Mole, a researcher and explorer of rare animals, finds Kwab Hippo in Africa and takes him to his villa in the remote Sibbelin Valley. Here he tries to raise Kwab. Anton Mole leaves for another expedition and asks Kwab to look after the villa. Every day he has to throw herbs into funnels. Kwab accidentally throws an overdose of herbs (the Fridgedair) into the funnels. An explosion follows and the Sibbelin valley is covered with a thick layer of snow in the middle of summer. The detective duo Oaks – Tootle tries to unravel the mystery.
The book als has a making of section. Here Stefan de Groot explains the proces of redrawing the story with samples of layouts, sketches and ink drawings. The entire story is drawn on the iPad in Procreate.
The book is a text comic. Text comics or a text comic is a form of comics where the stories are told in captions below the images and without the use of speech balloons. It is the oldest form of comics and was especially dominant in European comics from the 19th century until the 1960s, after which it gradually lost popularity in favor of comics with speech balloons. In the Netherlands, text comics even remained dominant as late as the early 1960s. Many European moral guardians looked down upon on comics as low-brow entertainment that made the youth too lazy to read. In some instances foreign balloon comics were simply re-adapted by erasing the balloons and adding captions underneath them.
