With two strips published a day, six days a week, the comic strip followed daily news events quite closely and often made references to real life news events. In the story "De IJzeren Kolonel" ("The Iron Colonel") (1956), for instance, the then-current Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising are incorporated into the plot. The series also had cameos by several Belgian and internationally famous politicians, such as Paul-Henri Spaak, Achiel Van Acker, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Wilfried Martens, Jean-Pierre Van Rossem, Jean-Luc Dehaene, Jozef Stalin, Mobutu, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hirohito, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Idi Amin, Khomeini , Margaret Thatcher and Saddam Hussein. Media celebrities, such as The Beatles, Pablo Escobar, Urbanus, Paul Newman and Frank Zappa were also frequently caricatured. Sleen also gave himself cameos in several stories. Very exceptional was the fact that all these jokes about past politics were not removed when the newspaper episodes were published in album format. This is the major reason why "Nero" provides readers with an overview of almost 60 years of post-war history in Belgium.