Intermedi: Herr Seele. Cowboy Henk

Herr Seele (Peter van Heirseele) was born in Torhout, Belgium in 1959. He is a painter, actor, TV presenter, piano tuner and cartoonist. He is the father of Cowboy Henk together with Kamagurka. In Belgium this character has his own cartoon series, a flesh and blood version on the radio and on TV, sculptures in squares and roundabouts, postage stamps featuring his image… his overwhelming popularity is almost unimaginable for a character who is both capable of picking shit with his own hands and who “reflects” on the twentieth century European avant-gardes.

Cowboy Henk is charming and irritating, he is a painter, hairdresser, shipwrecked, woodcutter, married, single, gay, good, bad… there are instances in which he displays an abrasive and caustic sense of humour and then he can switch to displaying motherly affection and then he comes up against the most absurd situations in a stoical manner, always reacting in an unforeseeable way just like a big boy or a deranged adult, depending on how one looks at it.

Cowboy Henk is at a crossroads somewhere between Surrealism and Dadaism. He combines delirium and black humour in equal measure, occasionally garnished with a few eschatological passages conveniently administered.

To this day, more than 2000 pages of Cowboy Henk´s adventures have been published, apart from in Belgium and Holland, in the US (RAW and Desert Island) in France (Fluide Glacial, Hara Kiri and Frémok), Finland (Huuda Hudda), Sweden (Placebo), Denmark (Forlaens Forlaget), Norway (No Comprendo Press) and this year, at last, in Spain (Autsaider Cómics).

A few months ago he achieved the highest international recognition when he received the Heritage Prize at the Angouleme Comic Festival in 2014.

(Ata)

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