Martin Lodewijk

Martin Lodewijk dropped out of high school, but that proved to be no obstacle in his career in comics. He started out with two books of 'Babel en Knetterton', before he began a collaboration with the publishing house ATH. There, he drew a dozen of astronaut comics from 1957 to 1958, followed by the pirate comic 'Arent Brandt' (later retitled to 'Captain Kidd').

Then he was asked to take over the 'Frank, de Vliegende Hollander' newspaper comic from Piet Wijn. After doing this for a year, he gave up on comics entirely. He started doing advertising art, and did not make any comics for six years.

It was Jan Kruis who advised him to return to the comics scene. In that time, secret agents were popular, so Lodewijk decided to parody this genre by creating his famous figure 'Agent 327' in magazine Pep in 1966. After several short stories, Lodewijk created the first long adventure in 1968.

He expanded his activities for Pep by writing scenarios for other artists. He created the gangster comic 'Johnny Goodbye' with Dino Attanasio, as well as 'Bernard Voorzichtig - Thee voor Twee' with Daan Jippes. When Pep and Sjors merged to Eppo in 1976, Lodewijk became editor-in-chief together with Frits van der Heide. He took over the writing of the popular science-fiction series 'Storm' from Dick Matena (art by Don Lawrence), and began 'January Jones' with Eric Heuvel. In 1978, he won the "Stripschapsprijs" - the great Dutch award for comic artists.

Besides creating comics, he has done a lot of commercial work. His drawings for the Amsterdam Zoo 'Artis', a series of laughing animals, became famous. After a long absence, Martin Lodewijk began a new series of 'Agent 327' stories in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad in 2000.

He also began the Dutch manga series 'Quark' with artist Adri van Kooten in 2003. Lodewijk and artist Claus D. Scholz were assigned as the new authors of 'De Rode Ridder', after the death of Karel Biddeloo in 2004.