Who Draws Hägar?

Hägar the Horrible has been a staple of the funny pages for a half century now, first debuting in early 1973. Cartoonist Dik Browne had been working on Hi & Lois for years by then, so he was certainly no stranger to the business. He kept working on it until his retirement in 1988, at which point he passed it along to his son Chris. Chris worked on the strip until his death last year, but the strip continues to run daily.

Honestly, I never paid much attention to the strip. Even back when I was a kid and read the funny pages in both the newspapers my parents got. I would read Hägar but only in that it happened to be on the page next to Garfield or Andy Capp or whatever else. Once I left home and no longer got a paper, I've only read it very sporadically, usually only when I'm looking to see how many cartoonists did a strip about Earth Day or something. I suspect I think more about Hägar the Horrible when I'm listening to Van Halen and make a quick mental joke about the similarity with Sammy Hagar's name. I do vaguely recall seeing news of Browne's death last year, but I don't know that I really continued the thought of who might continue to work on the strip. I suppose I assumed it would be taken up by Chris' brother, Chance, who'd taken over drawing Hi & Lois from their father in 1989.

However, earlier this month, I did see the Hägar strip that ran on July 4 when I was looking to see how many comics included some kind of Independence Day theme this year. And I was struck by how amateurish the strip looked...

The linework is stiff and lacks much variability. There's no sense of depth -- everything feels very flat, despite the pattern on the bedsheet. This doesn't feel like the art style that I've seen off and on for the past however many years.

Having different creators on the strip would hardly be new. I mean, Chris picked it up from his father in the '80s making it a legacy strip for decades just by that measure alone. But addtionally, Dick Hodgins, Jr. inked many of the strips over Chris' pencils, ostensibly dating back to 1995. John Marshall also inked and lettered the strip briefly in the early 2000s. (I've seen contradicting dates on that, but by all accounts, it was half a year at most.) Bob Weber, Jr. was brought on to write the strip in 2015.

In checking on the official Hägar site, however, the only two creators mentioned in the "Cartoonists" section are Dik and Chris. (Weirdly, although it does have birth and death dates noted, Chris' bio is written in the present tense and says he still lives in Florida with his wife -- they moved to South Dakota in 2005 and Carroll died in, I think, 2018.) However, Chris hadn't been working on the strip for not quite a decade before anyway. The strips have been written entirely by Weber, who brought with him Gary Hallgren in 2015. Hallgren has noted that he only did sketch layouts at first and took over inking duties when Hodgins took ill and passed away in 2016, and it was soon after that when Chris himself became too ill to do the pencil work any longer, and Hallgren took over the full art duties.

I found video of Hallgren speaking about his work at Comicfestival München 2023, which took place in July of last year. Hallgren seemed healthy and Denis Kitchen pointed out that he had been doing sketches for fans. But compare these two strips that ran on March 11 and 20 of last year...

In both strips, we have basically just two characters talking to one another. The first strip features a background mountains and clouds, and the characters' faces features expressions that change from the first to second panel. Their hands, while obviously drawn in a cartoony style, hold fairly natural poses. In the second strip, the background is all but nonexistent. Their faces are borderline expressionless, and their hands and arms feel stiff and in awkward positions. They feel to me like they're drawn by different people.

The first strip is absolutely drawn by Hallgren. Notice the odd shape of the key? That's a stylized "GH" that Hallgren sometimes hides in his artwork since he's not allowed to formally sign the work. But now compare the line pattern in Hägar's tunic. In the first strip, they're a series of squiggly lines with enough variation in weight to point to them being inked with a brush. In the second strip, it's just a series of disconnected hash marks that appear to just be made with an ink pen. If you go through the strip day by day, there's a distinct shift when this happens: between March 18 and March 20, 2023. (March 19 was a Sunday strip and likely created much earlier than the two on either side of it.)

So at first blush, it would appear that Hallgren stopped drawing -- or at least inking -- the strip in March of last year. That would contradict what he expressly said months later at Comicfestival München, but the strip to this day continues to bear Chris Browne's signature so inaccurate credits are hardly new here. But what did Hallgren actually say about working on the strip anyway? When asked by Kitchen about his day-to-day process, Hallgren responded...

I check the email because that's how the scripts come in [from Weber]. And when the scripts come in, I wait for Debra Browne to sequence them so that I know which strip is which release date and in what order. Because if I don't do that and just draw what Bob Weber sends me, and then I have to shuffle them and that's not effecient. So I don't waste any time drawing until I've got my sequence and then I bang them out. About a half hour a piece. Just a sketch... real quick sketch... small. So I know where the characters are, where the dialogue starts, where it's placed -- this is very important because each panel has to be composed in a way in which the action is totally clear, there is plenty of room for the words, and any kind of special art that needs to be seen has to have room, you know, for exposition. It's very important; each little panel is an important drawing. And I love strips where it's all dialogue and it's just two guys talking. It's easy...

And after I draw a little rough, I send those to the Brownes. And normally they just say, "fine, go ahead." And then I blow it up on my computer. I blow it up to art size and take it to my studio, put it on a tracing box -- you know what that is, right? A light table. Light's underneath. I can see through it. I take Bristol board, a nice paper, put it on there, draw in pencil... clear. Clear line, no shading. And get my pen and ink, and that's the process.

After it's done, I scan it, email it to Debra Browne, and I never see it again.

For the record, Debra is Chance Browne's widow and has been the editor on Hägar for many years. And again, this description of Hallgren's process took place months after Chris passed.

Still, the art style of Hägar definitely changed during the March published strips of last year, as I said. The art that appeared in those strips would've been drawn a minimum of two weeks, possibly as many as six, ahead of time, so the switch would likely have occured at the drawing board towards the beginning of Feburary. Which seems like a poignient point to segue to a reminder that Chris Browne passed away on Feburary 4, 2023. It's almost as if Chris' death directly impacted the artwork on the strip, even though he hadn't been drawing it.

Hallgren has been very clear that he was penciling and inking the strips after Browne first fell ill. And the various announcements on Browne's death noted, taken from comments directly from the Browne family, that he had been ill for some time. My guess is that actually goes back to around March/April of 2016 as the lettering style for the strips' dates changes and Browne's signature gets very shaky for a while before suddenly shifting to copy/paste consistency. In an 2023 interview with Chris' sister Sally, it's mentioned that Chris himself retired in 2017. Regardless of the specific timing, we're still looking at it having been years since Chris actually drew the strip.

Are there any other shifts we can see in the art when we compare before and after March of last year? I've gone through a variety of strips from the past year and found several of Hallgren's initials buried in the art at least as recently as two weeks ago, so it would appear that he's still working on the strip. Since Hallgren didn't originate the strip, I don't think a subsequent artist would add those in the way they might if Dik had included something like that. In the video I linked above, Hallgren's wearing a visored cap and sunglasses so I thought perhaps he's having issues with his eyesight. In digging through the ComicArtFans site, though, I've also found multiple sketches Hallgren did for fans around the time of that interview. Interestingly, they include the hash-style detailing on Hägar's tunic that I was thinking might be the result of a different inker and the sketches also point to the more fluid and natural character posing that Hallgren was clearly doing years earlier. Hallgren doesn't seem to have lost any of his artistic chops and the change in tunic design was more of choice on his part than simply from a change of inkers.

So are there any other clues in the past year's worth of strips? There does seem to be another shift in how the strips' dates are lettered. But while that does suggest a change in finishers, it doesn't speak to who that might be. However, while going through and checking for Hallgren's initials, I did notice several places where I thought I was seeing similarities with Weber's drawing style. Generally, just a background character here or there, but enough to make me pause. Weber, if you're not familiar, has actually done his own strips for several years, most famously Slylock Fox, which has been running since 1987. So having Weber draw at least some of the strips he's writing wouldn't be that odd a proposition. So I went back through some recent Slylock Fox strips to see if I could spot any more direct parallels. Compare this June 20 Slylock Fox with the July 4 Hägar the Horrible that I posted above...

The character's pajamas here bear a superficial similarity to the bed sheet earlier, mostly due to the same basic green and simple pattern. But notice in particular that the pillows have the same shape and lack any folds in them -- even a simple curved line to suggest there's a slight dip when one's head would rest, as is typical in cartoon pillows. The sheet also bears a similar treatment of the trim near the top. These are hardly tell-tale signs that Weber drew both strips, of course, but combined with some of the similar figures I'd been seeing already, I'm thinking Weber has a more direct role working on the art for Hägar than he used to.

I did consider that perhaps Weber's current partner on Slylock Fox, Scott Diggs Underwood, might be helping. After all, Weber was the one who brought in Hallgren to begin with, so maybe he opted to bring in someone else he knew when Hallgren began to step back a bit. But I absolutely can't see any of Underwood's style in Hägar at all. I mean, clearly whoever is working on Hägar has to change their normal style to at least somewhat match Chris' and Underwood does try to blend his style in with Weber's as seemlessly as possible on Slylock Fox, but I'm just not seeing anything in the art to suggest Underwood is touching Hägar.

I suspect -- and I'll admit up-front that I have no proof of this, much less anything resembling inside information -- that when Chris Browne passed away, Hallgren used that opportunity to step away slightly from working on the daily strip. He claims he's been only putting about 20 hours a week in on the strip, but he's also nearly 80 years old. While he doesn't seem to be in ill health, the visor/sunglasses combo he wears in that video along with the cane resting nearby suggest that his health isn't as good as it was even as recently as 2021, judging by his Facebook photos. His sketchwork, as I said, shows he's not incapable certainly, but the death of Chris could easily have him reflecting on his own mortality and wanting to spend less time mandatorially at the drawing board. Or potentially, he does have some eye issues that prevent him from staring at his light board for extended periods. Again, speculation on my part, to be 100% clear.

But doesn't that idea contradict his statements from June 2023 about how he works on the strip? Well, I think he still does contribute most of the art to it. I think he still gets scripts from Weber, does a rough thumbnail type sketch for approval, and then sketches out a full-size pencil version, which is why we still see the "GH" pop up in the art periodically. But note that he said he did those in a kind of clear line style, i.e. without shading and texture and much detail. If then, he passes the pencil art back to Weber and it's Weber himself who inks the piece, that would certainly explain while I was seeing some stylistic similarities with Slylock Fox and, depending on how loose Hallgen's pencils are, could also account from some of the figure stiffness we see in the final product. Further, some of those "GH"s look less like an actual "GH" than you would expect from someone putting their initials in the art...

They look like they were inked by somebody who just saw it as a general design element in the pencil artwork, not necessarily specific ligature. Note how the lower part of the "G" isn't even remotely conneted to the crossbar. Hallgren does mention inking in his statement, but I'm wondering if that was a still-recent-enough change to be considered a slip of the tongue -- he had been inking the strip for nearly a decade after all, and a new process would be, at best, only a few months old. It's also possible that Hallgren is still inking some of the strips -- most (but not all!) of the Sunday installments still look reasonably fluid. And if Hallgren is still inking some of the strips, he does seem conscientious enough of an artist to shift how he renders the tunic's texture to match Weber for the sake of artistic consistency.

So who is actually working on Hägar these days? Weber and Hallgren are both definitely working on the strip, but the breakdown of who actually does what is a bit murky, despite Hallgren's explanation from last year. Despite Browne's signature remaining on the strip every day, it appears to me that Bob Weber, Jr. is writing all of them, Gary Hallgren is doing pencils for all of them, the two of them are splitting inking duties with Weber handling the bulk of it, all while Debra Browne oversees, organizes, and rubber stamps their work. But if someone has conclusive proof of some other arrangement, I'd be happy to hear it!

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