Thierry Smolderen (born 25 November 1954) is an essay writer, as well as a script writer of Belgian comic strips. Smolderen is a teacher at École des Beaux-Arts of Angoulême, France. As a comic books historian, he wrote Naissances de la bande dessinée (2009), about the "platinum age" of comics. This book has been published in English by the University Press of Mississippi in 2014, under the title The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay (Eisner Award nominee of 2015 in the Best Scholarly/Academic Work category).