Art,  Belgium,  Brussels,  Cartoons,  Museums,  Street Art

brussels aka the land of comic strips

prior to visiting the tintin museum we also stopped by the comicstrip museum in brussels.  it has a section devoted to tintin but also touches on many other belgian based characters, the smurfs taking another section for themselves.

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everything about this building was gorgeous. its hard not to take some of these details for granted.

it was a beautiful space, located inside one of the buildings that victor horta, one of the key architects during the art nouveau era, built.  lots of natural light is allowed to enter the building through the windows on the towering ceiling and the fixtures are all so delicately crafted.  while the museum wasn’t much bigger than a name brand fashion store like h&m, it flowed very nicely and was split over four floors with a wide open common space.

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why hello there
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natural light shining through three floors into the lobby

i have to hand it to the belgians; their humour is dark, funny and not necessarily all pg friendly though its bordering on that line since its still reasonable cute… and i’m referring to those comics created in the 60s!

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better than my woodworking skills
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speechless 🙂

the tintin space was about 1/6th of the museum’s exhibition space and they packed it in real well.  having read his comics repeatedly as a kid, i was loving this.

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my facial expressions coach
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tintin nerds will love this
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a special print made for the museum made to resemble marlinspike hall. the museum’s logo is up at the top. so perfect.

while i wasn’t much of a smurfs follower, i couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic when reading about their adventures avoiding people and animals who wanted to eat them.  now that i think about it, that’s pretty dark for children’s programming isn’t it?!

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my smurfette

definitely a nice place to walk through if you’re remotely interested in comics.  if you’re a fan of architecture, this is definitely one building to pass through in addition to the victor horta museum which we unfortunately missed.

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fly me to the moon

as for comic strips, the exhibits don’t stop once you leave the museum.  all around town you can find large comic strip murals taking up the sides of buildings; a nice touch from regular street art and graffiti as it gives the neighbourhoods a lively coat of paint.

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-tourism brussels has released a map for this route but you don’t need it as they are literally all over town

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