Qualla: Museum of Comic Art https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:33 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Museum of Comic Art https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art Museum of Comic Art: Introduction https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art/ Photo credit Rudolphous, CC BY 3.0. By 2020, two attempts at a Dutch comics museum had already failed. The Strips! museum in Rotterdam went bankrupt. The Nederlands Stripmuseum in Groningen was absorbed into a broader multimedia operation and lost its identity. So when Ger Apeldoorn and John Asselbergs, two comics historians who had spent their careers thinking about Dutch comics, decided to try again, they did something different. They moved away from the big cities. They picked Noordwijk - a North Sea beach town better known for its dunes and its space technology center than for its galleries. And they decided not to build a museum. They opened a shop.

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Image: Rudolphous | CC BY 3.0

]]> Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/u171-museum-of-comic-art-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Museum of Comic Art: The Architect with a Collection https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art/ Photo credit Otter, CC BY-SA 4.0. What turned the idea into a building was Arie Korbee. Korbee is an architect from Noordwijk who had designed local landmarks - the cultural centre De Muze, the LAM modern art museum in nearby Lisse. He is also, separately, a serious collector of original comic art, with a persona...

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Image: Otter | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/u171-museum-of-comic-art-the-architect-with-a-collection.mp3 0:06 2 full Museum of Comic Art: The Pages That Made the Medium https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art/ Photo credit John2911, CC BY 4.0. What MoCA collects is original art - the actual sheets of paper that artists drew on, with the original ink and the original blue pencil lines underneath, before anything was printed. The starting roster reads like a syllabus of the medium. Winsor McCay, whose Little Nemo in Slum...

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Image: John2911 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/u171-museum-of-comic-art-the-pages-that-made-the-medium.mp3 0:06 3 full Museum of Comic Art: A Museum That Refreshes https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art/ Photo credit Huhu Uet, CC BY-SA 3.0. MoCA holds only a small permanent collection, which is the whole point. A new exhibition opens twice a year - one in summer, one in winter - which means a regular comics reader can come back every six months and see something completely different. The opening show, European Maste...

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Image: Huhu Uet | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/u171-museum-of-comic-art-a-museum-that-refreshes.mp3 0:06 4 full Museum of Comic Art: The Mural by Dick Matena https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art/ Photo credit John2911, CC BY 4.0. On one of the museum's interior walls is a mural by Dick Matena, who is to Dutch comics roughly what Robert Crumb is to American underground comix - a master craftsman of the long form, the artist who adapted Dutch literary novels like Reve's De Avonden into graphic novels that w...

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Image: John2911 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/u171-museum-of-comic-art-the-mural-by-dick-matena.mp3 0:06 5 full Museum of Comic Art: A Shopping Street, a Space Town https://qualla.com/museum-of-comic-art/ Photo credit John2911, CC BY 4.0. Noordwijk's most famous institution before MoCA was Space Expo, the visitor center for the European Space Research and Technology Centre that has operated here since the 1960s. John Asselbergs had previously curated a Strips in Space exhibition there - the connection between comi...

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]]> Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/7/1/museum-of-comic-art-wp/u171-museum-of-comic-art-a-shopping-street-a-space-town.mp3 0:06 6 full