Saturday 21st February 2026
Through the collection of the Vitra Design Museum, the exhibition Design and Comics: Living in a Box explores design and its relationship to the world of comics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, press agencies imposed comic strips on the American press landscape. As their popularity exploded in Europe in the 1920s, comic artists, led by Belgians such as Hergé and Franquin, began to incorporate design objects to illustrate their work.
During the 1940s and 1950s, new genres such as superheroes, horror, romance and science fiction gained in popularity.
In the early 1960s, as the pop art movement took centre stage, the colourful, fantastical visual language of comic books left its mark on design, as seen in Maurice Calka’s Boomerang desk in 1969 and Eero Aarnio’s Tomato Chair in 1971.
In the early 1960s, as the pop art movement took centre stage, the colourful, fantastical visual language of comic books left its mark on design, as seen in Maurice Calka’s Boomerang desk and Eero Aarnio’s Tomato Chair.
The exhibition pays particular attention to design in Belgian comics, and more specifically to the Atom style and Franquin’s characteristic Belgian playful modernism.
