Comic Strip Brussels: Murals, Tintin, and City Imagination

Centre belge de la BD 2017.jpg | Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Pierre Goiffon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Brussels is not only a capital of institutions. It is also a capital of comic strips, where illustrated stories spill from books onto façades, museums, souvenirs, and streets. Begin at the Belgian Comic Strip Center, housed in a former department store designed by Victor Horta. That pairing is perfect: the building lin…

Galeries royales Saint-Hubert, Bruselas, Bélgica, 2021-12-14, DD 04-06 HDR.jpg | Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert connect the comic-strip walk to Brussels' older culture of browsing and spectacle. Arcades, bookshops, cafés, and window displays helped make the city a place for printed pleasures. Moving through the gallery, imagine comics not only as images on paper but as part of urban leisure: som…

Jeanneke Pis, Brussels, Belgium (DSCF4010).jpg | Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Trougnouf / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

Jeanneke Pis is playful, tucked away, and deliberately less official than the city's grand monuments. It fits a comic-strip route because Brussels often uses humor to puncture solemnity. The stop is a reminder that the city's public imagination is not always monumental. Sometimes it is a small figure in a narrow alley …

Brussels comic book route- Tintin on rue de l'Etuve (Belgium, DSCF4461).jpg | Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Trougnouf / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

The Tintin mural near Rue de l'Étuve turns one of Belgium's most famous characters into part of the street. Tintin is globally recognized, but here he returns to an everyday wall in Brussels. The mural works because it collapses distance between fiction and city: a page-like scene becomes something you encounter while …

Bruxelles Manneken Pis.jpg | Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Manneken Pis belongs here as a character as much as a monument. His costume tradition, tiny scale, and outsized fame make him almost comic in structure: a simple figure endlessly reinterpreted. In Brussels, identity is often built through repetition and variation, exactly the logic that keeps comic characters alive.

Mur BD Broussaille, Frank Pé. Brussels.jpg | Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Ferran Cornellà / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The Broussaille mural is one of the emblematic stops of the Brussels Comic Strip Route. It shows how murals can soften blank walls and make a walk feel illustrated. Rather than treating street art as decoration only, notice the urban function: the city gives its corners narrative, color, and a reason to look up. By the…