Tina Festival 2024

Saying hello to 300 fans and farewell to Casa Kiki

Last weekend, tens of thousands of girls took over an entire amusement park at the annual Tina Festival, to celebrate their favorite comics magazine - and I was a part of it!

Together with several of my colleagues I resided in the Stripmakerstent, where we spent two days signing - albums, sketchbooks, note cards, hats, sweaters and t-shirts, sometimes with their owners still in them!

I kept a list of all the names that I signed, and there were over 300! Like last year, I was curious which names came up the most. Well, this year the name SAAR is the winner, with no less than six girls of that name showing up at my table. Second place goes to both LOTTE and EMMA, which showed up 5 times each, and third place is for ROOS, FLEUR and ZOË.

This is what I signed:

Here’s the whole gang of Tina artists who were there! Top to bottom, left to right: Gerard Leever, Dorith Graef,

Marloes De Vries

, me, Yiri Kohl, Jan Vriends, Alex van Koten and Robbert Damen!

This was the last time to sign Kikis - my comic Casa Kiki has come to an end. It was a wild ride, and we have four beautiful albums to show for it:

Album 3 and 4 were published simultaneously and presented at the Festival. What made the occasion extra memorable is that we spent the weekend in a bungalow on the park together with my stepdaughter Daniëlle and her kids, who had an appearance in a special snow adventure in the last album:

I loved putting “real” people in Casa Kiki. I drew myself and my husband on an Italian painting retreat there:

…and our friend Lidi, with Annie, of SnogMog fame, were granted a stay in the popular Cat Room:

I even included our greengrocer Marco! I made him a contestant in the show ‘Greengrocer wants a wife’:

Here he is today, holding the new album, which features him prominently on the cover!

Goodbye Casa Kiki! By the end of the Tina Festival weekend I got quite sentimental… so many fans, so many happy faces! Who knows if I’ll be back next year?