François Robert Velter (February 9, 1909 – April 27, 1991), known by his pen-name Rob-Vel, was a French cartoonist. He is best known for creating the character Spirou in 1938.
Like Spirou, Velter began his career as a lift attendant at age 16, in the London Ritz Charlton. He later learned the trade as an assistant to American cartoonist Martin Branner on the Winnie Winkle strip from 1934-1936.
In 1938, Velter created the title character for the launch of a new magazine by Belgian publisher Éditions Dupuis, Le Journal de Spirou. Signed with the pen-name Rob-Vel, the story was titled Groom au Moustic–hôtel (Bellboy at the Hotel Mosquito, named after another of Dupuis magazines). Later the same year, he created Spirou's inseparable companion, the squirrel Spip, for the story L’héritage.
When Velter was drafted and wounded in 1940, his wife Davine (Blanche Dumoulin) took over the strip for a while.
After the war, Velter published a number of strips, including Le Père Pictou, Les Tribulations du Chien Petto, Bibor et Tribar and M. Subito, but he was never able to reach the broad popularity of Spirou again.
Rob or ROB may refer to:
Rob (stylized in promos as ¡Rob!) is an American comedy television series that premiered on CBS on January 12, 2012, at 8:30 pm (ET) as a mid-season replacement for Rules of Engagement, and ended on March 1, 2012. The series stars Rob Schneider alongside Cheech Marin, Claudia Bassols, Diana Maria Riva, Eugenio Derbez, Ricky Rico, and Lupe Ontiveros. The show was produced by Two and a Half Men's The Tannenbaum Company and CBS Television Studios. On May 13, 2012, CBS canceled the series.
The series follows Rob (Rob Schneider), a former lifelong bachelor and landscape architect with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who marries into a tight-knit Mexican American family and attempts to be closer to them, often ending in disastrous results despite his good intentions.
William Robinson (5 July 1838 – 17 May 1935) was an Irish practical gardener and journalist whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to the popularising of the English cottage garden, a parallel to the search for honest simplicity and vernacular style of the British Arts and Crafts movement. Robinson is credited as an early practitioner of the mixed herbaceous border of hardy perennial plants, a champion too of the "wild garden", who vanquished the high Victorian pattern garden of planted-out bedding schemes. Robinson's new approach to gardening gained popularity through his magazines and several books—particularly The Wild Garden, illustrated by Alfred Parsons, and The English Flower Garden.
Robinson advocated more natural and less formal-looking plantings of hardy perennials, shrubs, and climbers, and reacted against the High Victorian patterned gardening, which used tropical materials grown in greenhouses. He railed against standard roses, statuary, sham Italian gardens, and other artifices common in gardening at the time. Modern gardening practices first introduced by Robinson include: using alpine plants in rock gardens; dense plantings of perennials and groundcovers that expose no bare soil; use of hardy perennials and native plants; and large plantings of perennials in natural-looking drifts.