The Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée — known in English as the Belgian Comic Strip Center — is Brussels' definitive museum dedicated to bande dessinée, the Franco-Belgian tradition of sequential art long regarded as the "ninth art." The museum occupies the former Waucquez fabric warehouse, a building commissioned in 1906 and designed by Victor Horta, the architect who essentially invented the Art Nouveau style. Horta's signature ironwork curves, glass-vaulted atrium, and fluid organic ornamentation make the building itself as much an attraction as the collection it houses. The structure was nearly demolished in the 1960s before being rescued and repurposed as a cultural monument, opening as a comic strip museum in 1989.
Belgium's outsized contribution to world comics is the museum's core thesis. The permanent collection traces the arc of Belgian comics from the pioneering years between 1929 and 1958, opening with Hergé — creator of Tintin, who first appeared in the children's supplement Le Vingtième Siècle on January 10, 1929 — and closing with Peyo, the artist who gave the world the Smurfs in 1958. Special focus is given to the legendary comics magazines Spirou and Tintin, which launched dozens of beloved characters and shaped the visual grammar of the medium across Europe. Each featured artist is honored with a dedicated room, designed thematically to reflect the mood and universe of their work rather than as a standard archive display.
Beyond the Belgian golden age, the museum provides a scholarly grounding in the broader history and craft of comics. A section on the mechanics of comic creation — from rough thumbnail sketches through inking, coloring, and lettering — offers genuine insight into the labor behind a finished page. An extensive gallery organizes original print plates chronologically by genre and style, situating Belgian work within global movements. Characters like Lucky Luke, Spirou, and the Smurfs are presented not merely as pop-culture icons but as products of specific postwar cultural moments, with original artwork, publisher correspondence, and production materials on display.
The museum is located on Rue des Sables 20, a short walk from the Gare Centrale and the Grand-Place. Plan for at least two hours to move through the permanent galleries at a comfortable pace; the upper floors dedicated to rotating temporary exhibitions often feature contemporary Belgian illustrators alongside international guests. The ground-floor atrium, anchored by a life-size model of Tintin's rocket from Destination Moon, is worth revisiting on the way out. A well-stocked shop sells original prints and hard-to-find editions, and the in-house brasserie occupies the original wrought-iron mezzanine — one of the finest lunching spots in the city for architecture lovers.
