Aimee de Jongh (1988, she/her) is an award-winning graphic novel author and animator from the Netherlands, whose books are published in more than 30 countries. With roots in the Dutch-Indies, history, migration and human relations are recurring topics in her work.

At the age of 22, Aimee’s career in comics took off with the daily comic strip Snippers for the Dutch paper Metro, which ran for five years. At 25, she published her first graphic novel The Return of the Honey Buzzard, which won the Prix Saint-Michel and was adapted to a live-action film. Her international breakthrough came when Blossoms in Autumn was released, written by Belgian comic author Zidrou. In 2019, Aimee created the autobio TAXI!.

In 2021, Aimee’s most well known graphic novel was released: Days of Sand. The Eisner-nominated book about the Dust Bowl was a bestseller. In 2022 Sixty Years in Winter followed, written by Ingrid Chabbert. In September 2024, her graphic novel adaptation of Lord of the Flies was published in more than 25 countries. A large retrospective of her work was exhibited in the Kunsthal, Rotterdam, in 2024. She published short comics in the magazines Spirou, Metal Hurlant and Fluide Glacial.

Alison Bechdel (1960) is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home. In 2025 she published the sequel Spent.

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As a drummer in a punk band, Barbara Stok created comics about her experiences in the workd of music. These were so successful that they became her main occupation. Ever since she has published fourteen books, including her biography of Vincent van Gogh, which has been published in more than twenty countries.

Claire Bretécher (1940-2020) dropped out of art school to become a comics artist. In 1963, she met René Goscinny, the writer of Asterix, among others, who wrote a comic strip about a postman for her. She was one of the very few women in the comics world at the time and worked for magazines including Tintin, Spirou, and Pilote.

Bretécher was also a pioneer in another way. In 1972, she co-founded L’Echo des savanes, a comics magazine explicitly aimed at adults. Her international breakthrough came with the comic strip “Les frustrées” (The Frustrated), which addressed female and feminist themes. She self-published it. For her first album, she won the award for best screenplay at the 1975 Angoulême Festival.

In almost thirty years as an artist Eliane Gerrits has illustrated dozens of children’s books. Next to that she works as a live cartoonist at corporate events. In her personal work she is known for her series of self portraits

Gerrie Hondius started her carreer as a comics artist in the 1990’s, with Ansje Tweedehandsje, about a clumsy anti-hero. The series appeared, among others, in Dutch feminist magazine Opzij. Later Hondius took to the stage, initiated a comics agency and worked for television. These days she makes live drawings with sand that are projected on a screen.

Judith Vanistendael (1974, Leuven) is a Dutch-speaking Belgian comics author, illustrator, and teacher in comics art. She also worked for a time as a children’s book illustrator.

Her breakthrough came in 2007 with the publication of La Jeune fille et le nègre, an autobiographical story in two volumes about the love between a young Togolese and a young Belgian. In 2012, Vanistendael published Toen David zijn stem verloor (David, women and death), whose hero is suffering from cancer and undertakes to change his life. In 2019, inspired by the character of Penelope in the Odyssey, Vanistendael delivered Les Deux Vies de Pénélope, where a doctor mother engages in humanitarian work and distances herself from her family, especially her daughter. (Wikipedia)

Klara Kracina (1999) is a visual artist whose work includes painting, printmaking, drawing, comics, and installation-based practices. In 2022, she graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and is currently completing her master’s studies in the same field.

In her personal work, she explores themes of identity, national consciousness, and collective nostalgia, while also addressing socially critical issues through humor and cynicism. She is an active member of the art collective Podmladek and was a founding and active member of the art-activist collective Kvadratni meter from 2019 to 2024. To date, she has held six solo exhibitions across Slovenia and has participated in numerous group exhibitions both in Slovenia and abroad

Her comics have been published in the Stripburger magazine.

Lauraine Meyer is a French graphic novelist and illustrator based in the Netherlands. She studied illustration and graphic design in Paris. Committed feminist, she questions gender norms and sexism with humor and a colorful and joyful style. Her main goal is to make complicated subjects more digestable in order to be accessible to everyone.

After a career as art director in advertising, she published Feminists in Progress in 2022, Moi, j’aurais pas fait comme ça in 2024 and Mecs in Progress in 2025. Feminists in Progress is available in Dutch.

Lian Ong (1956) studied illustration in Rotterdam. More or less by accident she ended up as a comic artist in the 1980’s. Her book Stuifmeel (Pollen), a romance between an middle-aged woman and a gay acrobat, was a sensation when it was published in 1989, being one of the first graphic novels in the Dutch language.

Although she did publish a few more stories after her debut, Lian Ong lost interest in comics. Nowadays she concentrates on other things, such as tai-chi.

Since 2005 Liv Strömquist (1978) has published more than ten books, often graphic essays dealing with social topics, such as inequality and feminism. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In her native Sweden she is a public figure, contributing regularly to discussions on radio and television.

The image shown at Cross Comix 2025 caused quite a stir when it was part of a billboard campaign in the Stockholm metro in 2017. Strömquist reacted to the outcry what she was used to her work causing controversy.

Since Maaike Hartjes first gained recognition in the mid-1990s with the tiny figures in “Maaike’s Dagboekje” (Maaike’s Diary), this has been her primary drawing style. This comic strip was published as a small-press booklet and, after a few years, appeared weekly in Viva magazine. The character of the comic strip changed somewhat, from small jokes to a more realistic diary format. This led, among other things, to Burn-out Dagboek (Burn-out Diary). In 2016, she won the Stripschapsprijs, the most prominent Dutch comics award.

Marguerite Abouet (1971) is an artist from Ivory Coast, who lives in France. Her series Aya de Yopougon, about a girl growing up in Ivory Coast, currently has eight installments. Over a million of her books have been sold worldwide. in 2013 the Aya stories were made into an animated movie, codirected by Abouet herself.

María Medem (1994) was born and lives in Seville, Spain. She began self-publishing fanzines after completing her fine arts studies. Her work has been published by Terry Bleu (Netherlands), Studio Fidèle (France), and Apa Apa Cómics (Spain).

Her illustrations appeared in, amongst others, The New Yorker and The New York Times. She also has made animated videos for bands such as Rival Consoles.

Nova de Hoo is a comic artist who wants to preserve the traditional elements of fun and irony in her comics, whilst also addressing social issues with care and sensitivity. She knows this is quite a difficult cocktail, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever fully get there!

She loves comics with her whole heart. Just like animation they are so incredibly concrete, and there’s no need to discuss a good comic because you don’t have to guess what it’s trying to convey, it’s just right there on the page.

As someone who is incredibly bad with abstraction and subjectivity, she loves the down-to-earth vibe that comics have. Currently she is writing a fictional story based on experiences she’s had in South Africa, hanging out with sex workers in Johannesburg and in doing so learning a bit about their struggles and dreams. In general she is drawn to feminist themes, and loves to write a little about her own experiences as a gay woman.

Octavia Roodt is a South African artist and researcher based in Belgium. A love of comics lured her away from the sunshine of her homeland to a residency in Angoulême, where she discovered an incredible range of visual storytelling and a healthy dose of culture shock. Somewhere along the way, Flanders stole her heart.

These days, she has laid her pen at the feet of a PhD at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts, where she works with a brilliant multidisciplinary team at the intersection of communication sciences, health humanities, care and ecological thinking. Together, they explore how comics can help people living with dementia share stories, memories and experiences. Her work is guided by the belief that drawing can open conversations that words alone cannot.

Pénélope Bagieu (1982), initially known as a blogger in her native France, achieved international fame with Les Culottées (translated as Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World), a series of drawn portraits of influential women from world history. She won an Eisner Award for it. She also creates animations and has her own lingerie line.

The international breakthrough of Ulli Lust (1967) came with her autobiographical graphic novel Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, which was originally published in German in 2009 and went on to be published, to great acclaim, in a dozen other languages. Her newest book, still untranslated, is Die Frau als Mensch (Woman as a human being).

Zeina Abirached (born 1981) is a Lebanese illustrator, graphic novelist and comic artist. Her graphic novel A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return, about growing up in war torn Beirut, established her name internationally.