The Volkskrant is one of the Netherlands’ most popular newspapers, so I was delighted to be invited to their offices. They were planning to publish a weekly supplement ‘Volkskrant Banen’ (banen: jobs) with articles and pages of classified ads focused on the job market. The editor and art director had seen my cartoons for Remco Claassen’s books and asked if I could come up with a regular cartoon on the job market theme.

It turned out not to be so easy. Although I speak passable Dutch, it’s not good enough for good, punchy captions, so the editor had to translate them. He was overworked as it was, plus we didn’t really share the same sense of humour and once when we arranged a meeting to discuss the situation, he forgot to show up. Still, we kept it going for nearly a year and looking through the cartoons, there’s a lot of material I really like.

Life doesn’t always have to be comfortable.

(NOTE: The cartoon above was the first to be published. I have translated it from Dutch for this website.)