The City Gave Its Blank Gables a New Job
Brussels calls itself the capital of the comic strip. That is the city’s description of itself, though it is difficult to dismiss when an entire building front has become a drawing. The City of Brussels and the Belgian Comic Strip Center began the Comic Book Route in 1991. They gave empty walls and gables to comic characters. An association of mural artists, Art Mural, went on to paint many of them, and it still adds a few new walls a year.
The result is not confined to a gallery or to a street devoted to souvenirs. Visit Brussels now counts more than eighty murals. They reach beyond the centre into Laeken and Auderghem. The drawing is not waiting at the end of a formal approach. It is there when the neighbouring building finishes and the bare side of the next building appears.
If a city famed for paperwork can make room for speech bubbles on its gables, perhaps the paperwork has performed a useful service.
The Gable Where Broussaille Began the Walk
On Rue du Marché au Charbon, a gable carries Broussaille, the character created by Frank Pé. This mural began the Comic Book Route: instead of asking a reader to hold an album, it asks a passer-by to take in the side of a building.
The painted gable changes the act of reading. A panel in a book is framed by paper, and your eyes decide where to go next. Here the real roofline draws the upper boundary; the neighbouring façades press in from the sides. You have to look at the street and the drawing together. I would not rush to identify every character along the route. I would give this gable the same attention I would give a page with no words: start with the frame, then watch what the drawing does inside it.
Step back into Rue du Marché au Charbon until the whole painted surface fits between the buildings.
Tintin Takes the Outside Stairs
Near the Grand-Place, Rue de l’Étuve, the street that runs down to the Manneken Pis, is narrow enough to make a visitor raise their head sharply. On a wall above the street, Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy occupy an outside staircase. The scene comes from The Calculus Affair. The staircase belongs to the drawing, not to the building’s daily traffic, but its steps make a convincing piece of borrowed architecture.
An ordinary comic panel has a border telling you where the adventure ends. Here the edge is brick and the action seems to have slipped onto the wall of an actual street. The stairway gives the eye something to climb. Look from the bottom of the painted steps to the figures, then back to the real windows beside them. The flat picture and the solid building disagree pleasantly about which space you are looking into.
The mural also keeps the joke of scale quiet. Tintin’s world, normally held between covers, has enough room here to tower over the people walking beneath it. Snowy is up there with the others, easy to overlook if you have already turned the corner.
Horta Gave a Fabric Shop Room to Breathe
Inside the Belgian Comic Strip Center, the reason to look up changes. The ceiling admits daylight through glass, and iron pillars hold open the space below. This is the former Waucquez textile store, an Art Nouveau building designed by Victor Horta for the textile merchant Charles Waucquez. Cloth once occupied the rooms now given to comics.
Horta used iron and glass to span large areas without filling them with solid walls. From beneath the roof, the columns do not seem to divide the room so much as leave it available for whatever people put inside. It is an elegant home for an art form made of small boxes.
The shop later closed, was protected as a monument and was bought by the Belgian state to house the comic-strip centre. Stand under the glazing and look up. I would give the room itself as much attention as the displays.
Hergé Drew a City That Could Read Its Lines
Tintin’s creator was a Brussels man. Georges Remi was born in Etterbeek, and his pen name, Hergé, came from pronouncing his initials in reverse order. His drawings became associated with ligne claire, the clear-line style, with clean outlines, clear colours and carefully detailed backgrounds.
That manner of drawing is particularly easy to appreciate on Rue de l’Étuve. A firm outline can separate a figure from a busy scene on paper; on a building it also has to hold its own against windows, brick and the edges of the neighbouring roofs. The painted staircase remains legible at a glance, even while the physical street competes for attention.
Let the Buildings Choose the Next Page
A route of murals is tempting to treat like a collection of names. Find Tintin, find Lucky Luke, tick off Gaston and move along. Brussels is more entertaining when the building comes before the character. Look for a gable at the end of a row, a strip of masonry exposed by a narrow street, a painted surface that makes you change where you stand.
The centre offers plenty of chances for that kind of walking, while the route reaches outside it too. I would rather follow an interesting roofline than hurry to complete a list. Keep your eyes above the shop signs.
