Willy Vandersteen (February 15, 1913 - August 28, 1990) was a Flemish creator of comic books. His most famous creation is the Spike and Suzy series, known as Suske en Wiske in Dutch.

Biography
Willy Vandersteen was born in Antwerp in 1913 in a poor family. He made many illustrations during the second World War, some of them for Nazi-friendly publications, but most fairly neutral and juvenile. For the youth magazine Wonderland he created Thor de holbewoner (Thor the troglodyte).
In 1943, he published his first comic album, Piwo (about the adventures of a wooden horse), followed by two more episodes in 1944 and 1946.

Youth and early work
After the war, many publications aimed at youth appeared in Belgium (either only in Flemish or in French, or in two editions), and Willy Vandersteen worked for many of these. He made some short comics and some longer adventures for the noted magazine Bravo, which also employed people like Edgar P. Jacobs.
As the best publishing opportunities in Flanders were in newspapers, Willy Vandersteen began the adventures of Rikki en Wiske in De Nieuwe Standaard on March 30, 1945, though Vandersteen was disappointed to see the editor had renamed the strip Rikki en Wiske. the arrangement lasted until 1959, producing the material collected in The Blue Series.

After World War II
Willy Vandersteen has always had a huge diversity of series, and besides Suske en Wiske, he also is known for De Familie Snoek (The Snoek family), De grappen van Lambik (Lambik's Jokes, a spin off from Suske en Wiske), Jerom (another spin-off), Bessy (a series about a boy in the Far West and his dog, based on Lassie), De Rode Ridder (Red Knight, a medieval, more realistic series), Karl May, Robert en Bertrand (about two tramps around 1900), and De Geuzen (about the Dutch resistance to the Spanish rulers at the end of the 16th century). In the forties and the early fifties, he made several other short-lived series, now difficult to find.

Other work
Bessy and De Rode Ridder were truly successful, although both were eclipsed by the success of Suske en Wiske, which had first editions of some 400,000 copies for every new book (four to six a year) in the 1970's, in Dutch only. Suske en Wiske has been translated into most major languages and some adventures with local interest also into more exotic languages, like Tibetan. In Germany, Bessy was highly successful, with new weekly episodes. In the end, more than a thousand were made.
Willy Vandersteen was awarded the 1977 Angoulême Best foreign comics author prize.

The studio
His early comics are among the most highly sought after by Flemish comics collectors nowadays and can fetch prices of up to a few thousand Euros. A complete collection, including commercial items, is almost impossible, as many of his early comics only appeared in ephemera, short-lived magazines with a limited audience. Original drawings are highly sought after.

Themes and influences
According to UNESCO's Index Translationum, Vandersteen is the second most often translated Dutch language author, after Anne Frank.