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Wilma van den Bosch was born in Welland, Canada, as daughter of Dutch immigrants. Her father worked shifts at General Motors; he was a blacksmith and also owned a farm (corn, pigs, milk cows and breeding race horses). Wilma's mother kept the farm running. Eventually, Wilma's parents became homesick and the family moved back to their hometown Sint-Oedenrode in the Dutch province Noord-Brabant. There, her parents set up the first public golf course in the Netherlands.
After graduating from high school, Wilma studied two years to become arts teacher. She didn't finish the study because actually having to teach a class was no success.
For seven years she lived close to the Dutch nuclear plant in Dodewaard, where she could witness a lot of the anti-nuclear rallies from real close. In those years, she tried a lot of odd jobs: caring for elderly people, saleswoman, working in a greenhouse doing inexplicable things to tomato plants, cleaning lady, etcetera.
These jobs were no success. The elderly made fun of her, and thought she was playing Little Red Riding Hood. Stores banned her to the storage room. And the one day Wilma had to enter orders into a computer system, established her legendary en fierce hatred for computers.
In 1983 Wilma read an interview with Morris (Lucky Luke) and decided she wanted to create comics.
She sent a 45-page script and two finished pages to several publishers: Dupuis, Casterman, Arboris, Standaard and Oberon, which all responded with polite rejections.
Having seen the script, Ed van Schuylenburg (art director for the Dutch weekly Donald Duck) phoned Wilma and asked if she could do scripts for short Disney-stories, with Little Hiawatha, Dumbo, Chip & Dale etcetera.
Of course Wilma declared herself capable of that. She just had to rush out first and buy an issue of the magazine, because she had never read it before.
For a couple of years Wilma wrote Disney-scripts. But she still wanted to become an artist, so she drew one of her scripts herself and showed the result to Ed van Schuylenburg.
After a lot of practice, Wilma was accepted as a Disney-artist.
Now she works three days a week as staff artist for the Dutch Donald Duck weekly.
Apart from that, she still works as a freelance artist and writes scripts for Donald Duck and the new magazine Katrien (starring Daisy Duck).
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PRINCESS ASTER
Even before working for Disney, Wilma wanted to create a comic of her own. In her spare time, she made a 45-page story about "Princess Aster" and sent it to a Dutch magazine called "Taptoe", because she thought it would fit well in that. Unfortunately, Taptoe had just decided not to publish long stories anymore. So Wilma offered the story to Thom Roep, editor in chief of Donald Duck, and he was willing to publish it as a non-Disney comic in Donald Duck.
"Princess Aster, Eureka's Light" was printed in 1999 in de weekly Donald Duck, issues 9-21. In october 2001, VNU Tijdschriften BV (now: Sanoma Tijdschriften) published it as a comic book.
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