Jacques Laudy

Jacques Laudy (7 April 1907 – 28 July 1993) was a Belgian comics artist who contributed to the early issues of the weekly Tintin magazine.

Jacques Laudy was born in Schaerbeek in 1907 as the son of the painter Jean Laudy. He worked mainly as a painter, illustrator, and comics artist. Laudy started his career as an artist for Bravo magazine that, like Spirou magazine, was one of the leading Belgian comics publications before and during World War II. One of the other artists there was Edgar Pierre Jacobs, who had first met Laudy in the 1920s and who would become a lifelong friend. Laudy was the physical example for Blake, one of the main characters of Jacobs' Blake and Mortimer.

Hergé asked Laudy as one of the first artists, together with Jacobs, Paul Cuvelier, and Jacques van Melkebeke, to fill the new Tintin magazine. Laudy created The Legend of the Four Aymon Brothers. His only real series was Hassan et Kadour, while the rest of his oeuvre consisted mainly of one-offs, stories that didn't belong in a series. This lack of a series and lack of album publication also meant that Laudy never became as well known as the others. In 1992, he was the focus of a retrospective exhibition at the Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art.

His main interest outside art was music. From 1928 on, he was a collector and maker of pipes, mainly Scottish ones. An instrument made by him in 1940 is in the collection of the Musical Instrument Museum of Brussels.

Awards

 * 1974: Grand Prix Saint-Michel