Dick Matena comic book catalogue

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Dick Matena (The Hague, April 24, 1943) was a versatile Dutch writer, comic artist, and scriptwriter of comic stories. In addition to his real name, he published under the pseudonyms A. den Dooier, John Kelly, and Dick Richards. More

Dick Matena (The Hague, April 24, 1943) was a versatile Dutch comic artist and writer of comic stories. Besides his real name, he published under the pseudonyms A. den Dooier, John Kelly, and Dick Richards.

Matena started working unpaid at the Toonder Studios in 1960 at the age of 17. In the beginning, Matena mainly contributed to drawing projects for Tom Poes (1962-1963) and Panda (1961-1968).
In 1964, he started working freelance, initially only for the Toonder studios. In the beginning, he drew his first own comic strip, Polletje Pluim, among others. In 1968, the first comic strip by his own hand appeared in the youth magazine Pep.

From 1982 to 1984, Matena lived in Spain, where he drew the comics The Web and The Preacher for the Spanish agency Selleciones Illustrades.

At the request of the Toonder studios, he breathed new life into Tom Poes in 1997. Two of these stories appeared in Donald Duck. On October 19, 2012, the one-off Bommel glossy was released. Matena designed the cover and various illustrations for this glossy. From March 8, 2013, a new Tom Poes story appeared, "de Pas-Kaart," for which Matena was both the writer and the illustrator.

Ambitious projects involve adapting some twenty classic novels from (international) literary history into comic form.

In 2023, a collection of autobiographical columns was published by Uitgeverij L under the title 'Nu ben ik er nog'.
April 2025, his most recent project: redrawing and coloring all 65 strips of 'Tom Poes in the Land of the Tin Men'.

In 1986 he won the Dutch Stripschap[rize] for his entire oeuvre, and in 2003 he won the Flemish Bronze Adhemar.

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