Collecting Newspaper Comic Strip Clippings – Benjamin L. Clark, writer

Hagar the Horrible by Dik Browne, 9/19/1979

I was organizing some old newspaper comic strip clippings, and there was this lone daily Hagar the Horrible by Dik Browne, originally published on Wednesday, September 19, 1979.

I’m a fan of Hagar, but I don’t have any newspaper clippings, just a couple of the old mass market paperbacks. I don’t even have the recent 50th Anniversary collection, but I’ll need to get that at some point. I especially like the earlier strips for the art, and also when it’s more Viking-y and less Domestic-y. Less “Medieval Blondie,” more raiding parties, and besieging castles, and crashing longships, and swords jagged and dull from battle. And dragons. Dragons, to me, feel like a really underrepresented part of modern Hagar strips.

This clipping is early-ish in the strip’s history, still during originator Dik Browne’s tenure. Although it’s a domestic theme, it still made me laugh. It’s also a nice two-panel strip, which can be hard to pull off effectively, but here, the mental smash cut works really well. I like that Hagar is barely in it, popping up his woolly head for a cameo. So, for the sake of completeness, we have Hagar’s wife, Helga, telling Hagar she’s headed to the market and asking what he’d like for dinner. Hagar, uncharacteristically, says, “Why don’t we just have something light?” In panel two, Helga is at the butcher’s, asking for a small cow.

Did the strip clipper mean to send this to someone? Maybe they, too, had a Hagar in their life who would say they only wanted “something light,” only to really want a huge spread. Maybe this helped them smile at the endless “What Should We Do For Dinner” conversations. Or, maybe they planned to hang it on the fridge for a little laugh as they opened the refrigerator for the millionth time that week to see what could be done to solve the daily problem.

Do you have a favorite “relic” comic strip clipping saved somewhere, or are you more of a 50th-anniversary hardcover collection type of person?

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About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

A small pile of Eek & Meek daily comic strip clippings. They are printed in blank ink on yellowed newsprint paper. They all date between 1967 and 1970. — A small pile of Eek & Meek daily comic strip clippings, 1967-1970

I recently acquired some comic strip clippings for my collection, and it came with a bonus batch of clippings for a strip I don’t collect, but I’m glad to have. I don’t know much about cartoonist Howie Schnieder, but I was aware of his Eek & Meek, though I didn’t realize it ran so long! I think of it as an early 1970s strip, which may be when it was most popular. Or maybe it’s just because my own newspaper, where I read the comics through the 1980s and 1990s, did not have it. Anyway, it’s fun to look at, which is the first thing a good comic strip should achieve. It’s also pretty funny.

Eek & Meek was a gag-a-day strip about anthropomorphic mice, though much later they would turn into people. I much prefer these mouse designs, though. The humor reminds me of early Johnny Hart B.C., and there’s something of Fontaine Fox in these poses. He really gets a lot of expressiveness into these characters that are really little more than stick figures, but there are other cartoonists who do this today. The drawing is interesting in its own way, as syndicates at the time became less concerned about detail and more on simplicity, or even so-called “bad” drawing, which is nearly always not actually true, but yes, much simpler compared to strips popular through the 1930s and ’40s. There’s something about it that reminds me of Stephan Pastis’s wonderful Pearls Before Swine, too. The drawing, in one sense but also the humor. I wonder if Stephan liked Eek & Meek growing up? I’ll have to ask him. Anyway, here are the eighteen clippings I have in chronological order, ranging in dates from 1967-1970: