Andreas: I had read Vandoorn's booklet Comment on devient créateur de bandes dessinées on Franquin and Jijé. It mentioned the address of the Saint-Luc in Brussels. When I inquired after the enrollment dates, it turned out that I was only just too late. That's why I first did a year of academy of arts in Düsseldorf. It was a higher education, comparable to a university. I won't say the education was useless, but I wanted to go to Saint-Luc. You could find workshops and follow lectures on arts history, anatomy and such. I did a course on graphic art, I learned how to do engravings, silk-screen painting, and lithography. An architect taught us how to draw in perspective. From him I learned how to draw architectural perspectives, vanishing points, composition of an image, etcetera. I have to say this knowledge still comes in handy. In short, I liked it there. In hindsight I would have not been a bad architect after all, because I was really interested in it.

Saint-Luc was interesting for other reasons, at least to me. At the end of the year there always was a jury of people from the trade to give grades. Those people mostly commented and criticized. It was interesting, but the members of the jury always kept themselves low-profile. There were also less well-known people, who I don't really remember. But in the final year, to be precise, the last day at Saint-Luc, Jijé dropped by. He was absolutely fantastic. He trashed everyone, and I mean everyone. Except for François Schuiten. He was the first one that told me: "That is bad; that stinks; junk. Watch! That is badly drawn... There and there... That doesn't work at all!" Of course I was completely nailed to the floor, but at that moment I truely saw what I had made, free from the schoollike view that was so common at the academy. I told myself: "He is right. That's where you're wrong, it is badly drawn. It's not good. There you're wrong, that doesn't work. That's bad..." At that moment I changed what I could. I started to see, make sketches, spending more attention on the anatomy and draw more realistically. I arrived at a drawing style resembling the first Rork. Then Eddy Paape asked me to work for him.