Jean Pierre Gustave Dratz (Jean Dratz, Belgian Dubout; March 16, 1903 - October 12-13, 1967) was a Belgian painter, illustrator, cartoonist, and caricaturist. He was born in Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium. He received degrees in Law and Economics from the Université libre de Bruxelles but maintained a lifelong passion for art. This passion he inherited from his father, Constant Dratz (1875 - 1946), an artist best known for illustrations for the Belgian worker's movement and sober landscapes. Jean Dratz worked as an illustrator and co-founded the Belgian satirical artist association 'Mine Souriante.' He later worked on the design for the Brazil and Chile Pavilion at the 1935 Brussels Exposition Universelle and the Congo Pavilion at the 1958 Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles. During the Nazi occupation of Belgium during World War II (1939 - 1945), he kept under the radar by avoiding politically volatile subject matters. Nonetheless, during this time, he was the artist director of the Flemish edition of Bravo! Due to Nazi censorship, he was forced to replace the newspaper's popular American comic strips, such as Flash Gordon with local strips, leading to the rise of the post-war comic industry in Belgium.
