I forgot which short-lived magazine this was for. They asked me to do a one-page comic for each edition, reflecting on the news. News was that the police would start mobile drug test labs and I thought this would be a funny translation. Actually, I like the police officers outside, in the Dutch rainy night, the most – you can feel the crankiness, hahaha.

‘Baby Boom in Amsterdam’ is a comic in which my returning heroine is an alien visiting the planet earth. Earth has only one country, the Netherlands, and Baby Boom appears as a naked woman in the middle of the Dams square. But nobody notices anything: too busy with their phones. But when someone finally notices her, suddenly everybody does. And everybody has an opinion about her, it becomes life threatening within minutes.

Baby Boom comes with a message: In the future, Earth will be knocked out of orbit by accumulating debris, property, and refugees on the tiny bits of land that still rise above the water on one side of the planet. Eventually, Earth will collapse with Baby Boom’s planet XSSMLXL. We need to do something. Nobody is interested in her message, however, as everybody here is only interested in their own profits while nobody seems to be able to look ahead or have any concentration to focus on any problem and it’s solutions.

Baby Boom is published by Hum! Publishers, who (joy!) also published the Dutch version of Philemon.
here you can see some pages, but of course, the real thing is holding the book in your hands and read it. Touch and smell that paper!

Although I am not an arrived comic artist, iwas ballsy enough to try to reinvent the medium. I tried to make the story unfold in your head rather than by separate frames with frozen actions. How? Look for yourself!
On every page there are references to works of art and to (pop, political and art) history – there are many layers and details to enjoy. But basically, i had a good laugh myself thinking up the jokes and drawing them over three years.

Comic in the Dutch Hustler magazine. At the time (in 2004) it tried to change itself into a left wing magazine with sex pictures – great concept – but I wasn’t asked again after the experiment of the editor in chief to ask me to draw a comic and do an interview. The storyline was written by Philippe Machin

I need to look really hard in my archive for the rest of the pages – at the time, I scanned everything but due to the continually changing digital connections the scans are now on back up disks that no computer reads any longer. I have the originals here – maybe I find time one day to find somebody with an A3 scanner kind enough to help me out.

At this moment, i could find only one page of ‘Baby Boom at Robodock’ in my archive. This was a 4 page comic story about my heroine accidentally visiting the industrial tech-art festival Robodock and was published in the program booklet. The tramp in the comic is based on a robot that was really there, as is the bath-installation.

I made this comic about 29 years ago. She was born as the ‘Devil’s Daughter’ and I used to be referred to as  ‘the Designdevil’. I made a comic of the most beautiful woman I could draw being born from my had – constructed in my brain. I show it here because 25 years later I actually met the real Baby Boom who also has an incredibly fitting character to mine and is now my girlfriend for 4 years.

Currently I develop ‘Baby Boom’ in Amsterdam for which she sometimes poses and I always pass my ideas to her and check if they are any good. She happens to be a brilliant artist, feel free to check it out at lauraadima.com