Mussengang

The Mussengang serial was the brainchild of Peter Bügel, a psychologist working for the GP training programme at the UG and an editor at UKrant. Peter Bügel was inspired by the US satiric novel The Serial by Cyra McFadden. The Serial appeared in the 1970s as an illustrated serial in two US weeklies. Bügel asked his friend Bert Cornelius to create illustrations to accompany his stories of life in a Groningen student house, and submitted the idea to the other UKrant editors. The response was positive.

The serial was to be called Mussengang, after a well-known dilapidated alleyway in the centre of Groningen. The early years of Mussengang were set in a fictional building (number 9) in this alleyway running off the Schuitendiep.

In the early days, four UKrant editors took turns writing the Mussengang instalments. In addition to Peter Bügel, the writing team included Luuk Hajema, Wim Köhler, and Hans Kuné. Köhler and Kuné soon dropped out, following which Peter Bügel and Luuk Hajema co-wrote the serial for a number of years. In 1989, Frank den Hollander joined the writers’ duo, followed in 1992 by UKrant editor Christien Boomsma.

Through all these changes in the writers’ collective, one factor remained constant: the controversial drawings of Bert Cornelius. At first, these were mostly illustrations to accompany a written story. But soon, Bert began to put his own spin on the stories, taking off where the writers had left off. As a result, the stand-alone instalments of Mussengang often acquired an original cliff-hanger that made readers anticipate a follow-up, and sometimes left the writers facing a dilemma: how to continue from here? Bert Cornelius had his own ideas about it, and a few times, especially in the last phases of the serial, he wrote the following instalment himself.