Kolk made his debut in the magazine Tante Leny Presents! In 1980 he was one of the founders of the comic artist collective Studio Arnhem. After working anonymously for the weekly Donald Duck for some time, he switched to the comic magazine Eppo in 1984, for which he started to make the comic Gilles de Geus. Apart from being a draftsman, Kolk was also active as a screenwriter for other comics, including Falco and Donjon by Uco Egmond.
Together with Peter de Wit, he made the photo strip Mannetje & Mannetje, which was later edited for VPRO television. The duo also presented the Teleac course in Comic and Cartoon Drawing and since 2001 have produced the comic strip S1NGLE for Het Parool, De Gelderlander and Algemeen Dagblad, among others. At the end of the eighties, Kolk and De Wit started their own publishing house, De Beeldenmaker, where, among other things, The Tweezers Range was published.
An artistic highlight in Kolk in 1992 with his comic Meccano, which is particularly popular in France. Other well-known comics by his hand include Cor Daad (for Taptoe) and Inspector Netjes (for Sjors and Sjimmie / Sjosji). Another highlight, certainly for Kolk himself, was a commission from the renowned magazine The New Yorker for a series of illustrations in 2006. In 2010 he made a graphic novel with Arnon Grunberg about Arnon’s journey from Istanbul to Baghdad. In 2017 he made the album Tulips from Istanbul for the Spirou and Fantasio series Spirou. In 1996 he won the Stripschap Prize for his entire oeuvre. In 2009, the P. Hans Frankf Further Prize was awarded to him.
Hanco Kolk was mentor of Vrijplaats Residency 2021 participants Noël Loozen and Guus Kaandorp and mentor of Vrijplaats 2021 – Positionality participant Carine Bijlsma.