De kleuren van het getto
Caryl Strzelecki is a Flemish comic artist, cartoonist, illustrator and advertising artist. He was born in Koersel as the son of a Polish father and a Dutch mother in 1960. He has lived in Lommel since 1971, and he studied at the Graphic School in Eindhoven. He published his first comic stories in local magazines like De Nete and Publiflash. He regularly contributed to the bi-weekly family magazine Jet in the period 1981-1983, and in 1982, he created the weekly comic 'Oebel en Isabel' for Top-Magazine. In 1984, he cooperated with Raoul Cauvin on the series 'De Lolympische Spelen' in Robbedoes, the Dutch equivalent of Spirou. Cauvin and Caryl, as he signed his work, also contributed to the 'Zee, Zon, Strand' holidays book by Standaard in 1986.
De Lolympische Spelen
His series 'De Familie Koemans' ran in the daily 24 Uur, and collected in 'Duistere Tijden...?', Caryl's first book publication, by the publisher Clumzy in 1985. He subsequenly worked with Yaack on 'Wilm van de film' (Standaard Uitgeverij) and 'Met de rode guiten naar Mexico' (Gazet van Antwerpen, 1986), and with Uco Egmond on 'Daphne, Diederik & Floppy' (Het Volk, 1987-1989) and a comic about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Top-Magazine, 1988). He additionally made the stop-comic 'Vincent' on the occasion of the hundred year anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death, for Het Volk in 1990. For this comic he used the pen name Chessman.
Caryl Strzelecki spent the 1990s working mainly for advertising agencies. He returned to the field in 2000 with the remarkable comic story 'De Koffer', which was written by cult novelist Herman Brusselmans. As a children's book illustrator, he is mainly known for his collaborations with writer Leander Hanssen. He also made a great many "graphic poems", based on poems by Charles Bukowski.
In 2011, he published the graphic novel 'De kleuren van het getto', about the Warsaw ghetto, in cooperation with writer Aline Sax. The English edition was awarded the National Jewish Book Award and the Sydney Taylor Book Award. Caryl's next graphic novel was published in 2013. It was a collaboration with Rudi Vranckx and called 'De Gierenclub'.
In 2011 he paid graphic homage to Pom in the collective tribute album 'Op Het Spoor van Pom' (2011).
De gierenclub