Herman Hedning #1/1998 [1]
Herman Hedning #1/1998 marks the graduation of Jonas Darnell's anarchic prehistoric caveman from a back-up strip into a standalone anthology magazine — a structural milestone for Scandinavian humour comics. After a decade of appearing as a supporting feature inside Fantomen, the Swedish Phantom title, Herman finally had a dedicated stage where Darnell's irreverent theology, Stone Age grotesquerie, and pitch-black satire could breathe at full length and in anthology form alongside fellow Scandinavian contributors. The launch established a publication format that would run for twenty consecutive years under Egmont and then continue independently after a crowd-funded revival, proving the character's unusual durability in a market that had already claimed many contemporaries. It also introduced readers to the full cast of recurring characters — Herman, Gammelman, Lilleman, Lucifer/Satan, Skaparen, Adam, Eva, Kain, Abel, and the Jävelberg family cluster — assembled together for the first time within a single periodical home.
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Jonas Darnell created the Herman Hedning strip in 1987–1988 for Egmont's Fantomen magazine, where it debuted as a comedic counterpoint to the straight-adventure Phantom stories it accompanied. By 1998, after a decade of strips and a series of collected albums beginning in 1990, Egmont's Swedish publishing arm, Egmont Serieförlaget, launched the dedicated anthology magazine with Ulf Granberg serving as responsible publisher (ansvarig utgivare) for its entire Egmont run through 2012. The inaugural year saw only two issues published — a cautious launch schedule that expanded to six in 1999 before settling into a standard eight-issues-per-year cadence — and the magazine's contents from the outset combined Darnell's own Herman material with strips by contributing artists including Patrik Norrman (whose Bacon & Ägg characters carried over) and Norwegian cartoonist Frode Øverli. When Egmont dropped the magazine in 2018, Darnell launched a Kickstarter to fund an independent successor publishing house, and the series continued with minimal interruption.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First issue of the dedicated Herman Hedning anthology magazine, published by Egmont Serieförlaget AB in 1998 — Herman had previously appeared only as a back-up feature in Fantomen (the Swedish Phantom comic) since 1988.
- Created, written, and drawn entirely by Jonas Darnell, with contributing strips from Patrik Norrman and Norwegian cartoonist Frode Øverli, as credited in the Grand Comics Database entry for the issue.
- A promotional variant of this first issue also exists, recorded by the GCD as a separate entry (Herman Hedning #1/1998 [promotion]), indicating Egmont distributed advance or sample copies to market the new magazine.
- Ulf Granberg served as the magazine's ansvarig utgivare (responsible publisher/editor of record) from launch in 1998 through 2012, per GCD series data.
- The inaugural year of the series comprised only two issues (1/1998 and 2/1998), before expanding to six issues in 1999 and then eight annually from 2000 onward.
- The magazine functioned as an anthology from the start, bringing together the core Herman cast (Herman, Gammelman, Lilleman, Skaparen, Lucifer/Satan, Adam, Eva, Kain, Abel) alongside supporting characters and guest strips — including Patrik Norrman's Bacon & Ägg characters Ägg and Bacon, and the Jävelberg family.
- The series ran under Egmont for twenty years until 2018, when Darnell launched a Kickstarter to create an independent publishing house (Serieförlaget Herman Hedning) and resumed publication independently.
- Material from the 1998–2001 run of the magazine, including content from this first issue's era, was later collected and reprinted in the Kickstarter-funded hardcover omnibus Herman Hedning 1998–2001 SVAMMELSURIUM.