Alfred Mazure, Artist and Writer

A-Maz-Ing Maz

Alfred Mazure

A while back I posted a Romeo Brown story drawn by Dutch cartoonist Alfred Mazure. Talented and prolific, Mazure worked as an illustrator, a comics artist, a novelist, and a filmmaker. I spent considerable time hunting for information about Mazure and his career. While I found a fair amount of material, there were frustrating holes in his story and not everyone agreed on several points. That aggravating Internet phenomenon, Read and Repeat, clearly affected several sites. For example those who described Romeo Brown as "a suave and sophisticated detective" obviously had never read a Romeo Brown episode.

Therefore the following is a work in progress desperately in need of input from others. I'd especially like to hear from Dutch readers with access to offline material that might clear up some points. This isn't Primary Source material. Please don't cut and paste!

Alfred Mazure began his art career in his native Netherlands, where he was born in 1914 (some sources say 1913). The self-taught artist's first comic creation, a detective strip called De Chef , appeared in 1932 when Mazure was only eighteen. It didn't make any waves.  Mazure spent several years wandering about Europe and Africa.

De Chef (source: Lambiek.net)

Upon his return "Maz" tried again. This time he hit paydirt. Dick Bos, which premiered in 1940, followed the adventures of a two-fisted private detective. The series got off to a slow start until Mazure hatched the idea of handing unsold copies out to school kids.  It was a brilliant move. Before long Dick Bos was a star. Mazure both wrote and drew the Dick Bos stories, which were printed in an unusual pocket-sized format, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a single panel on a page. Soon the character was on his way to becoming a national institution.

From a Dick Bos story (source unknown)

Unfortunately history intervened. World War II had begun in 1939 and the Netherlands had hoped to remain neutral. However in 1940, the same year Dick Bos debuted, Germany invaded and occupied the country. The Nazi government noted Bos' popularity and asked Mazure to turn the detective into an SS officer. They offered a blank contract and a print run of a million copies an issue. It's unclear whether Mazure was an active member of the Resistance or simply a sympathizer; either way he rejected the offer. As a result his books were banned.

1960s Dick Bos magazine (source: Lambiek)

Information about what Mazure did during the war is contradictory. Several sources say that he went into filmmaking. However some suggest he made films for the Resistance while others say he made films commercially, though without much success. He did apparently produce anti-Nazi comics and illustrations. Dutch readers, please clear this up for me. At any rate, after the war (1946) Dick Bos reappeared, first in reprints, then in  new stories. The series was a hit all over again, appearing in both comics and novels. It seems to be at this time that Mazure signed a publishing contract that haunted the rest of his days. As has happened so often in comics history, Maz got very little while his publisher reaped huge profits from Dick Bos' growing popularity.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. Mazure was obviously unhappy with his contract, but he seems to have continued producing Dick Bos.Two subsequent events combined to end his Dutch career. I'm unsure which came first.  One was a growing public sentiment against comics. The Ministry of Education accused comics of having a pernicious effect on youth. When, in 1948, a 16-year-old boy murdered his 15-year-old girlfriend, a media storm arose around his having been a comics reader. We Americans have heard this one before!

A second event damaged Mazure's personal reputation. For reasons I can't figure out, the artist got lumped together with a group of other creators alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis during the War. How this happened given his pro-Resistance work is a mystery to me. Again I beg Dutch fans with inside knowledge to fill me in.

At any rate, Mazure gave up and moved to England to start over. He worked there for over twenty years as an illustrator, author, and strip cartoonist.

Cover for a novel (source: Radboud Coll.)

 He tried several times to recreate his success with Dick Bos. In 1948, the Daily Mirror published Mazure's Sam Stone, a detective who resembled Dick. The strip lasted two years. I also found several references to another detective strip called either Bruce Hunter or Bruce Bunter. I haven't found samples of either feature. Hunter/Bunter supposedly ran from 1951 to 1953, which would have released him just in time to launch Romeo Brown in the Daily Mirror (1954). This strip established Mazure's reputation as a pretty-girl artist. Most of his subsequent projects involved sexy women. He left Romeo in 1957 to illustrate another "girlie" strip, Jane, Daughter of Jane.

Jane, Daughter of Jane (British Cartoonists Collection)

 This was an attempt to update the grandmother of all girlie strips, Jane, which had titillated British soldiers during World War II. The attempt failed. The artist's next project seems to have been another clothing-challenged daily called Carmen & Co. Of this strip I've found a single example on Lambiek.net.

Carmen & Co. (source: Lambiek)

Somewhere in here--around 1960, apparently--Mazure returned to Dick Bos, both in print and in a film. How this came about I don't know. Maybe he was desperate: there is no record of his having renegotiated his contract, and sources imply that Mazure was always short on cash. This new Bos material seems to have ended around 1967, about the time Mazure wrote three English-language sexy-spy novels under the series banner Sherazad. He also had one more fling with comic strip ladies in 1969-1970, when Mayfair published Lindy Leigh. Mayfair was a Playboy-style magazine, and Lindy appears to have featured more nudity and sexual situations than Mazure's earlier strips Again I haven't been able to find samples online.

Sherazad title page (source)

Alfred Mazure died in 1974. He was only 59 years old. His creation, Dick Bos, is recognized as an important part of Dutch comics history. An excellent site, dickbos.com, posts classic episodes and provides background about Mazure's career. Unfortunately a link promising further information about the artist is dead.

Unidentified strip from Arie K. Collection. Could this be Carmen?

Alfred Mazure's Romeo Brown

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo?
 
Romeo Brown first appeared in 1954 in London's Daily Mirror, home of the grandmother of "girlie" strips, Norman Pett's Jane. Romeo Brown was a clueless private detective who fancied himself irresistible. His mysteries always found him surrounded by beautiful girls wearing clothes that never stayed on. The drawings were by Alfred Mazure, a Dutch-born illustrator with a long and interesting career both at home and in England. (I'll talk about his background in my next post.) Mazure drew the strip through 1957.

Romeo Brown is poorly-documented and its history is obscure. Many online sources credit writer Peter O'Donnell as co-creator with Mazure. This is clearly an error: O'Donnell began writing Romeo in 1956. No one seems to know from whom he took over. In an interview O'Donnell merely said he was offered the job because "the editor was dissatisfied." Given that Mazure had written his own scripts in the past, might he have been the original Romeo writer? Maybe, but several sources state that Mazure, after working with O'Donnell for a year, left Romeo to launch "his own creation," Carmen & Co., at a rival newspaper. If he'd been the original Romeo Brown author, wouldn't Romeo count as his "own creation"? At any rate, following Mazure's departure O'Donnell continued writing and Jim Holdaway took over the art chores. We all know where those two wound up. (One source said Holdaway had been Mazure's assistant, but I haven't found confirmation of this.)

In a 2002 online interview, O'Donnell described the strip thus: "Romeo Brown was a comic private detective, and my brief was that every story was to revolve around a girl or girls, and the more clothes I could safely get off them the better."

The Holdaway-O'Donnell Romeo Brown has gained a small international following, though reprints are few. It's too bad that Mazure's Romeo has suffered as a result. While Mazure's free, brushy style and Holdaway's sharp-focused penwork were worlds apart, both men were excellent cartoonists and both did a fine job on Romeo Brown.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two artists' approaches was in posing. Holdaway developed a broad slapstick approach, while Mazure's work was always tempered by fashion-art elegance.  As we see in the present story, languid, long-legged realistic women co-exist with broadly-cartooned men. Romeo himself has a cucumber head and shoebutton eyes, while his adversaries' husbands--one a wizened alcoholic, the other a bloated bureaucrat--are so incongruous that the reader wonders what the girls see in them. However there's no question what their husbands see in them.

As a fan of both men's work, I'm reluctant to label one the "better" artist. All the same, I'd like to suggest that though Holdaway brought a more consistent, more exciting look to the strip, he never managed to best his predecessor in one area: drawing pretty women. Don't misunderstand me. Holdaway's beauties had great bodies. Their faces were cute. But Mazure could draw a face that was knock-down gorgeous. He proves it in this episode, especially with Pussy, the more free-wheeling of the larcenous ladies. Mazure knew he had a good thing going, and provided us a wealth of ravishing closeups. These faces showcase the best features of Maz' bold, free brushwork.

The following story begins with strip N208. British strips I've seen with letter/number identifiers use the letter to identify which story it is (A for the first story, B for the second, etc.) and the number to indicate where the strip falls within the story (so A1 is first story, first daily and E65 is fifth story, 65th daily). That doesn't seem to be the system here  "N" may mean the 14th story, but "208" must mean something else. Probably not the cumulative number of strips--that would yield an average of only 15 strips per story!

I have never found Mazure's work in English. This story came from an Italian fanzine called Wow. I translated their script back into English. But it's possible that the Italians shot their strips from a French reprint. In that case my approximate script is three generations removed from the original dialogue. But we're here for the pictures anyway, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we've all admired these beautiful drawings, will someone please explain the talking neck shot in strip N218???!