Comics fans visiting Brussels before 11th April 2026 are strongly advised to head out to the city’s southern suburbs to see the magnificent temporary exhibition, “Nous nous sommes tant aimés, Valentina” (“We loved you so much, Valentina”), devoted to Guido Crepax’s signature character Valentina, currently running at the Galerie Martel on the Chaussée d’Ixelles.
On display, visitors will find over thirty pieces of original art by Crepax, all beautifully framed and satisfyingly displayed on crisp white walls and under good lighting. Interpretation labels are in both French and English. Whilst Valentina is the main attraction, there are also pages from Crepax’s thematically and visually similar tale, Anita, on show and the gallery has a small selection of Valentina-related books for sale, including the French-language volumes of the heroine’s tales produced by Dargaud with colouring by Crepax’s own family, following the artist’s death in 2003.
With looks based on those of silent film star Louise Brooks, photographer, adventurer and agent provocateur Valentina Rossellini first appeared in comics in 1965, in the pages of the Italian anthology title, Linus. Given that she was destined to become Crepax’s best known character (and by some margin his longest running) there is considerable irony in the fact that initially she was merely a sidekick to the strip’s putative leading man, investigator Philip Rembrandt, aka the superheroic ‘Neutron’.
Valentina quickly replaced Rembrandt as the focus of the tales and continued to feature in Crepax’s work until 1980, appearing in some thirty separate stories. Valentina is also one of that relatively rare breed – the European comic character who has also made it onto the big screen. Played by actress Isabella de Funes, Valentina does battle with the witch Baba Yaga in director Corrado Farrina’s film of the same name from 1973.
Combining op art graphic design with sinuous figure drawing, Crepax’s highly idiosyncratic art is instantly recognisable, often playing humorously with the grid system of comic book panels and using extreme close-ups or repeated images to create narratively coherent but visually arresting pages.
The Valentina stories are not the most sexually explicit of Crepax’s oeuvre (elsewhere, he adapted Emmanuelle, The Story of O and Venus in Furs amongst other novels into comics) but many of the pages on display at the Galerie Martel are highly eroticised, and the gallery carries an explicit content advisory notice lest unwary visitors of a sensitive disposition wander in off the street to be scandalised.
Jim O’Brien
• Nous nous sommes tant aimés, Valentina… runs until 11th April 2026 at Galerie Martel, Chaussée d’Ixelles 337 1050, Brussels | Entrance is free. | Tel: +32 (0)2 721 79 57 | Open: Tuesday to Saturday from 2.30 pm to 7.00 pm | Exhibition Details Here
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