‘Very satisfactorily drawn’, says the always skeptical Maarten van Rossum in a blurb video on YouTube. He is talking about The last journey of De Vrijheid, the 74th comic strip in the Captain Rob saga. That does not come from draftsman Pieter Kuhn, because he died in 1966, and screenwriter Evert Werkman has also been dead for 34 years. It is a one-off tribute to a classic that, together with Eric de Noorman and Heer Bommel and Tom Poes, is considered one of the Big Three of the so-called subtitle strip. In 100 episodes, the new story first appeared in Het Parool, just like before, and now as a book.
Journalist and writer Frank von Hebel has chosen to present Captain Rob as an old man, in the here and now, which allows him to play with anachronisms. For example, Captain Rob has to help rescue a three-masted three-masted ship in Hollywood, ‘The Widowmaker’, where he finds with satisfaction that the adrenaline is flowing through his veins again. Also, the evil Professor Lupardi has been resuscitated, who after a hibernation of fifty years says: ‘First a cup of coffee please.’ All this is very skilfully depicted by draftsman Fred de Heij. His recreation offers the reader a déjà-vu-like experience and takes him back to the last century, on an adventure with Rob and his shipping dog Skip.
Fred de Heij (drawings) and Frank von Hebel (text): The last journey of De Vrijheid. Personal details; € 17.50.