Stan Sluyts is a Belgian cartoonist, illustrator and designer, who spent many years working for a large publishing firm. He also assisted Erik Vandemeulebroucke on his production for Kauka Verlag in the 1970s. Sluyts additionally a second career as a far-right cartoonist for several nationalist publications under the pen name Korbo. In Flanders he is one of the house cartoonists of the party magazines and pamphlets of the extreme-right party Vlaams Blok (nowadays Vlaams Belang), whose associations without lucrative purpose were sentenced in 2004 for advocating racism.
Early life and career
Stan Sluyts was born in 1940 in the Brussels municipality Etterbeek into an artistic family. His main inspiration was Hergé. At the age of 14 he had his first job with a lithographic print shop in Brussels. He later worked for a newspaper, as decoration designer for a textile screen printing firm and as a cartographer in the Geographic Institute of the University of Leuven. In the early 1970s Sluyts settled in Antwerp, where he commenced his activities as an illustrator, advertising artist and logo designer. By 1971 he joined Erik Vandemeulebroucke in his production of 'Tom und Biberherz' and 'Fix und Foxi' stories for Rolf Kauka's magazines in Germany, alongside other co-workers such as André Donders, Guido de Vogel and Hugo de Sterk. From mid 1973 until 1991 he was poster artist, graphic designer and publicity and editorial illustrator for the promotion service of a large magazine publishing and distribution firm. He did freelance assignments as a comic artist, cartoonist, illustrator and graphic designer for publishing firms, manufacturers and individual clients.
Far-right cartoons
On the side he had a career as a political cartoonist, illustrator and designer for nationalist and national-conservative publications. He used several pen names for these activities, of which Korbo was the most common. They appeared in such extreme-right periodicals as EG: Europa Een (1965), Europapost (1966-1970), De Anderen (1967-1968), Alarm (1974-1977), Le Nouvel Europe Magazine (1975-1977), Haro (1977-1978), Austrian Aktuell/Sieg (1978), Vlaams Blok/Inzet (1980-1986), West Magazine (1981-1983), Revolte (1984 et 2010), De Jonge Geus (1985), Forces Nouvelles (1990-1991), Ket (1996-1999), Nation (2000-2001), Polémique (2002-2003) and 't Pallieterke (2005, 2006-2009), as well as on websites like Belhamel (since 2001) and 't Scheldt (since 2001). His work was also reprinted in foreign far-right publications such as La Voce della Fogna in Italy (1980), Gäck in Germany (1980-1984), Le Rat Noir in Switzerland (1980-1984), Victoire in Austria (1978-1988) and Pas de Panique à Bord in France (1993), while other publications copied or plagiarized Korbo's work. Work by Korbo was collected in the comics album 'Kraaiepoten' (1978), which also featured work by Prik, Jack Marchal, Gommer and Julius. A second collection appeared in 1984 under the title 'De Schizofreaken', followed by a French album 'Glasnost c'est pour quand...à l'Ouest?' in 1990.
Vlaams Blok/Belang
Between 1980 and 1990 Korbo was the propaganda campaign designer of the Flemish far-right political party Vlaams Blok. He has the questionable honor of being the designer of the notorious "It's good to be white" stickers, which are handed out at demonstrations and events. The man also illustrated the controversial pamphlet 'De Meester Doet Het Weer', which was part of a campaign launched on 13 March 1989. Vlaams Blok wanted to encourage pupils to report teachers with "left-wing opinions" to them. Particularly if said teachers criticized racism and drew comparisons between their party and Nazism. The party would then collect all this information and publish it in a black book. The campaign sparked outrage among many people, but novelist Tom Lanoye sarcastically claimed it was a "great idea". In his weekly editorial in the magazine Humo he called for readers to write as many fictious letters to the party headquarters as they could. Within a few weeks more than 784 letters flooded their office. Vlaams Blok had their hands full with reading each and every one of them, let alone determining whether they were real or not. Eventually they only considered ten copies to be genuine, way too little to publish a book about. Therefore the entire campaign failed.
In 1999 Korbo made a comic strip about Vlaams Blok politician Johan Demol. Demol was a former police chief, who was fired from his job because of his previous association with the far-right militia Front de la Jeunesse. The man subsequently went into politics as party leader for Vlaams Blok in the Brussels Regional Parliament during the 1999 elections. As part of their campaign, the party commissioned Korbo to create a comic strip about Demol. The booklet treated the man's dubious past in the militia in one single panel, in which his membership was diminished and romanticized as part of a love story. Nevertheless Demol left the party in 2010 after they lost the previous two elections with disastrous low results.
Writings
In 1981 Sluyts wrote a study about extreme right-wing comics for comics information magazine Ciso Stripgids. Between 1995 and 1996 he also wrote articles for the French fanzine Bédésup about (supposed) hidden masonic aspects in Hergé's World War II work.
