Adri van Kooten was born in Ridderkerk, the Netherlands. He started out working for an advertising agency in the early 1980s, before he entered the comics field through Martin Lodewijk. He illustrated one of Lodewijk's scripts with the character 'De Kat', called 'De Kat in Kitzbühel'. He then became one of the driving forces behind the amateur magazine Yéch, together with Willem Ritstier, Minck Oosterveer and Caren Peeters.
