« How do you know you’re facing a tough mosquito? You slap him and he slaps you back! »
We’re in October, and I’m still getting mosquito bites. I have no polite words to say about that (not in mixed company, anyway). However, the blood-sucking buggers did make me think of a colourful, frequently violent (but also quite funny and oftentimes charming) strip, Cowboy Henk.

Written by Belgian cartoonist Kamagurka (a.k.a. Luc Zeebroek) and illustrated by Flemish cartoonist Her Seele (real name Peter van Heirseele), Cowboy Henk ran in the weekly Flemish magazine Humo from 1981 to 2012 (and, once this strip was translated to English, it also appeared in Art Spiegelman’s Raw.)
The strips have been collected in “King of Dental Floss” published by Scissor Books in 1994, which is a tad difficult to find, but quite worth it, in my opinion. Me, I’m lucky to have an anthology in French (published by FRÉMOK in 2013), easier to acquire than the English version. Of course if you speak Dutch, there’s many collections available to you that the rest of us have sadly no use for!
~ ds