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.