Comics Art Museum | Brussels

This guide to the Comics Art Museum in Brussels starts with the building rotting and empty by 1980, a decade after its doors closed, and rewinds to 1905 when architect Victor Horta raised this iron-and-glass hall for textile baron Charles Waucquez. It follows the warehouse through Waucquez's death and the business's slow collapse, an architect's fight to get it protected in 1975, and the unlikely rescue plan that Herge's right-hand artist Bob De Moor brought to the Belgian state in 1984. Look up at the wrought-iron arches that once framed bolts of silk overhead.