'Kappie en de God van Duizend Vrezen' (1946).
Mary Oosterdijk was one of the few female artists working for the Toonder Studios. Between 1942 and 1949, she was involved in the studio's animation projects. In 1946, she drew some of the early stories of Marten Toonder's 'Kappie' newspaper strip.
Early career
Not much is known about Mary Oosterdijk's life and career. She was presumably born in 1914 in the city of Nijmegen. She was registered in the civil registry as Marij Cornelia Jannetje Oosterdijk, a name later corrected to Maria Cornelia Janna Oosterdijk. Her father Wilhelmus was a mailman. During at least the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, she was living in Amsterdam, working as a fashion artist and illustrator. In the 1930s, she had been an artist for the publishing company Nederlandse Rotogravure Maatschappij in Leiden, making illustrations for magazines like Cinema en Theater under the pen name May.
Toonder Studios
One of Oosterdijks Rotogravure co-workers was Marten Toonder, and she later joined him in his own Toonder Studio's, at the time the largest production house of comics and animation in the Netherlands. During the early 1940s, she participated in the animation of the film 'Tom Puss, Das Geheimnis der Grotte' (1944), a production that kept the studio operative during World War II, but which was never completed. Throughout most of the 1940s, Mary Oosterdijk continued to work in the animation department of the Toonder Studio's, with credits on 'The Haunted CastIe' (1948) and ''The Magic Music' (1948).
Shortly after World War II, Oosterdijk also worked briefly for the studio's comics department. After Marten Toonder himself had created the first story, Oosterdijk drew the second, third and fourth story of the newspaper comic about tugboat captain 'Kappie'. All published in newspapers over the course of 1946, the texts of 'Kappie en het Neveleiland', 'Kappie in China' and 'Kappie en de God van Duizend Vrezen' were written by either Marten Toonder or his wife Phiny Dick. Later pencil artists of the 'Kappie' series were Frits Godhelp (who als inked the Oosterdijk stories), Joop Hillenius, Ton Beek, Richard Klokkers, Dick Vlottes, Fred Julsing, Jan van Haasteren, Terry Willers, Gustavo Martz-Schmidt and Piet Wijn.
Later career
In 1949, Mary Oosterdijk and several other workers from Toonder's animation department left the studio to join Joop Geesink's Dollywood studios. Later in her career, Mary Oosterdijk was active as an illustrator of fairy tales. In the early 1960s, she ran Studio Mozaik in Amsterdam's Schinkelstraat, through which she made artwork for advertisements and postcards. One of her co-workers there was former Toonder Studio colleague Lientje Meyer. Mary Oosterdijk died in 1996, and was buried in Nijmegen.
Caricatures of Hollywood actors Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Joan Crawford and Wiliam Powell by "May" for Cinema en Theater (15 January 1938).