Jacques Laudy

Who was Jacques Laudy?

Jacques Laudy was a Belgian comics artist who contributed to the early issues of the weekly Tintin magazine.

Jacques Laudy was born in Schaarbeek 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.