Cafe Cowala
Bruno De Roover was born in Brugge, Belgium in 1972. He studied communication at the Ghent Institute for Corporate Training as well as Graphic Design at the Sint-Lucas School of Arts in Ghent. Since 2000 he has worked as an artist for Studio 100, where he has drawn comics based on popular children's TV characters such as Kabouter Plop, Samson & Gert and Wizzy & Woppy. De Roover has also made advertising comics, designed websites and made a comic for the Belgian parliament, 'Flosj in het Vlaams Parlement'.
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Flosj in het Vlaams Parlement
In early 2003, he became freelance collaborator with Studio Vandersteen, where he has cooperated on 'Suske en Wiske' short stories with Marc Verhaegen and later Luc Morjaeu. Since 2006 he is mainly involved in cooperating on the scripts with Peter van Gucht. He began his animal comic 'Café Cowala' in P-magazine in that same year. The first book was published in 2012, the same year that De Roover announced to put his strip on-hold for a while.
In 2005 De Roover made a graphic contribution to 'Suske en Wiske 60 Jaar!' (2005), which paid homage to Willy Vandersteen's 'Suske en Wiske'. He drew a graphic tribute to Pom in the collective tribute album 'Op Het Spoor van Pom' (2011). In 2020 he joined 75 Dutch & Flemish comic artists to make a graphic contribution to the free collective comic book ‘Striphelden versus Corona’ (Oogachtend, Uitgeverij L, 2020). The book is intended to support comics stores who had to close their doors for two months during the lockdown at the height of the COVID-19 virus pandemic.
In 2016 he and Luc Cromheecke made 'De Tuin van Daubigny' (2016), a biographical novel about 19th-century French painter Charles-François Daubigny.
In 2016-2017, he was part of "The Wolfpack", a creative team of Standaard Uitgeverij assigned to come up with new ideas for spin-offs with Willy Vandersteen's classic creations, following the success of 'Amoras' and 'J.Rom Force of Gold'. The other members were storyrunner Johan De Smedt, film director Vincent Bal, comic colorist and animator Tom Metdepenningen and the Dutch/Flemish comic authors Lectrr, Stedho, Romano Molenaar, Gerben Valkema and Aimée de Jongh.
