{"id":12563,"date":"2014-10-15T08:00:24","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=12563"},"modified":"2014-10-14T18:28:34","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T18:28:34","slug":"hagar-the-horrible-the-epic-chronicles-dailies-1980-1981","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2014\/10\/15\/hagar-the-horrible-the-epic-chronicles-dailies-1980-1981\/","title":{"rendered":"H\u00c3\u00a4gar the Horrible: The Epic Chronicles – Dailies 1980-1981"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy <\/strong>Dik Browne<\/strong> (Titan Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-78116-715-1<\/p>\n

<\/strong>Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: a perfect package of traditional fun\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 9\/10<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although very much in decline these days, for nearly 200 years cartoon strips and gag-panels were the universal medium of wit, satire mirth and cultural exchange. Latterly we purveyors of primarily sequential narrative have exhibited an unhappy tendency to become protective and parochial about our own particular specialism within the greater art form.<\/p>\n

How many times have we heard an artist or writer working on a hot new comicbook property revelling in sales of sixty-to-seventy thousand monthly copies, almost simultaneously disparage strips such as <\/strong>Dilbert, Dick Tracy <\/strong>or <\/strong>Garfield<\/strong> whose daily readership can be numbered in millions, if not billions?<\/p>\n

Let’s all just try to remember that tastes differ, and that we’re all just making lines on a surface here, and most especially that TV and Computer Games are the real enemy of our industry, shall we?<\/p>\n

OK, rant over.<\/p>\n

Mainstream cartooning is a huge daily joy to a vast and often global readership whose needs are quite different from those of hard-core, dedicated comic fans, or even that ever-growing base of intrigued browsers dipping their toes in the sequential narrative pool. Even those stuck-up stickybeaks who have pointedly \u00e2\u20ac\u0153never read a comic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d have read and enjoyed strips or panels, and in this arena Britain has seen not only a golden bounty of home produced material but also imported some of the very best the rest of the world has to offer.<\/p>\n

Dik (AKA Richard Arthur Allan) Browne was a native New Yorker born in 1917 who studied at Cooper Union and apprenticed as a copy boy and art-bod for the <\/strong>New York Journal America<\/strong> before joining the US Army.<\/p>\n

His wartime duties in the Engineering Corps included strategic map-making, but whilst in service he also created the comic strip Jinny Jeep<\/em> about the Women’s Army Corps, which set the tone for his peacetime career.<\/p>\n

A professional cartoonist and illustrator, he worked for <\/strong>Newsweek<\/strong> and in advertising after mustering out, gaining a reputation as a superb logo designer (<\/strong>The Campbell Soup Kids<\/strong>, <\/strong>Chiquita Banana<\/strong> and the <\/strong>Birdseye Bird<\/strong> number amongst his most memorable creations).<\/p>\n

He also dabbled with comicbooks – a few <\/strong>Classics Illustrated Junior<\/strong> issues – and produced some children’s books, before teaming up with <\/strong>Beetle Bailey<\/strong> creator Mort Walker to draw the hugely successful spin-off strip <\/strong>Hi and Lois<\/strong> in 1954.<\/p>\n

Whilst illustrating that family comedy – and deviously training his sons Chance and Chris to take eventually over his cartooning duties – Dik devised another strip that he would write as well as render.<\/p>\n

<\/strong>H\u00c3\u00a4gar the Horrible<\/strong> debuted through the King Features Syndicate on February 4th<\/sup> 1973 and quickly became a world-wide hit. The strip is still a fixture in 1900 newspapers in 58 countries in thirteen languages and the iconic characters have migrated to books, comic albums, games, animated movies, toys and more\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Dik Browne retired from cartooning in 1988 and tragically died from cancer on June 4th<\/sup> 1989. Chance now continues <\/strong>Hi and Lois<\/strong> whilst Chris continues to wield pen, wave sword and wear the chief’s horned helmet on H\u00c3\u00a4gar\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

A certified classic of World Cartooning,<\/strong> H\u00c3\u00a4gar the Horrible<\/strong> is the ongoing subject of a comprehensive collectors series and this latest (sixth) monolithic hardback compendium covers 7th<\/sup> July 1980 to January 2nd<\/sup> 1982, with the hard-drinking, voracious sea-roving Viking and his scurvy crew constantly trekking out to far climes before perennially staggering home to their quirky families in a never-ending stream of sight gags, painful puns and surreal situations.<\/p>\n

This volume opens with a passionate reverie from a close associate and fellow star cartoonist in the Foreword by Lynn Johnston<\/em> before Chris Browne shares memories of one his dad’s most imaginative and appealing children’s books (<\/strong>The Land of Lost Things<\/strong> co-created with Mort Walker) in ‘The Lost World of Dik Browne’.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then, before the cavalcade of comic calamity commences, readers old and new are regaled with a handy chart of the H\u00c3\u00a4gar Family Tree<\/em>, reintroducing the great man and his doughty dependents: Helga<\/em> the long-suffering wife, studious son Hamlet<\/em> and troublesome teenaged daughter Honi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Also making an appearance are faithful canine Snert<\/em>, stroppy house-duck Kvack<\/em> and the hero’s faithful if intellectually challenged sidekick Lucky Eddie<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

The magic of these daily strips is the constant stream of japes and capers constantly revisiting established themes and hot-button topics. Over the hundreds of pages that follow you can see H\u00c3\u00a4gar’s perpetual struggle to bring home the bacon (and wine and gold and textiles and\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6), spar with Helga as she fruitlessly struggles to civilise her barbaric oaf of a man, and Honi’s torment as she pines equally for seedy musician Lute<\/em> and noble knight Sir Philip Courtright<\/em> whilst testing out other matrimonial options and alternatively considers a career as a axe-swinging Valkyrie\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Bookish Hamlet is always there to disappoint and delight his gregarious, bellicose dad; Snert and Kvack frequently outwit and appal the humans who share their home whilst Lucky Eddie and the mismatched crew of incompetent sea-reavers follow the red-bearded rascal into battle against foreign armies, daunting dragons, a coterie of assorted clergy and the unwelcoming elements, content in the knowledge that somehow, somewhere they will find more booze\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Enticing, irrepressible, hilarious and deeply satisfying, <\/strong>H\u00c3\u00a4gar the Horrible <\/strong>is a masterpiece of the strip cartoonists’ unique art form and one guaranteed to deliver delight over and over again to young and old alike.<\/p>\n

H\u00c3\u00a4gar the Horrible is \u00c2\u00a9 2014 King Features Syndicate and \u00e2\u201e\u00a2 Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved. All strips \u00c2\u00a9 1980 & 1981 King Features Syndicate. All rights reserved. All other material \u00c2\u00a9 2014 their respective authors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dik Browne (Titan Books) ISBN: 978-1-78116-715-1 Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: a perfect package of traditional fun\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 9\/10 Although very much in decline these days, for nearly 200 years cartoon strips and gag-panels were the universal medium of wit, satire mirth and cultural exchange. Latterly we purveyors of primarily sequential narrative have exhibited an unhappy … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “H\u00c3\u00a4gar the Horrible: The Epic Chronicles – Dailies 1980-1981”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[90,113,78,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-classics","category-comedy","category-comic-strip-classics","category-kids-all-ages"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-3gD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}