William Van Cutsem, aka William Vance, is a Belgian comics art-ist who started out as an illustrator in the world of advertising at the end of the 1950s. He was first introduced to cartoon work as assistant to Dino Attanasio on a Bob Morane in 1961. And it was thanks to Henri Vernes, creator of Bob Morane, that Vance con-tinued to publish illustrations for the same series in the magazine Femmes d’Aujourd’hui from 1967.In 1976, he created a maritime series for the Belgian weekly, which only published the first episode. It was thus that Bruce J. Hawker, Lieutenant of the British Navy, was born, and thanks to the quality of this series Vance was able in the end to get all the stories pub-lished in France and Belgium, where they appeared in the weeklies JournalTintin and Hello Bédé between 1979 and 1990. Talking about his passion for writing this particular series, Vance explains: “Without wishing to sound pretentious, I’d say that it has to be part and parcel of who you are. It’s difficult, almost impos-sible, to explain what I feel. When I’ve got my drawing in front of me and I’m working on one of these sequences, my mind becomes detached from reality and whisks me off into all that welter of spray. (...) I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the sea, especially when it’s wild. When I’m drawing, I can recreate all those sensa-tions quite naturally and spontaneously. It’s in my guts!” (interview with Alain Ledoux in 1996, in Sapristi ! no 36).