Herman Hedning & Co [julalbum] #3
Herman Hedning & Co [julalbum] #3 (1994, Semic Press) is an early installment in one of Sweden's most durable annual Christmas comic album traditions, a series that began in 1990 and has run uninterrupted ever since—outlasting the vast majority of its contemporaries on the Swedish market. The album consolidates Jonas Darnell's anarchic prehistoric universe—populated by cavemen, dinosaurs, biblical archetypes, and sharp pop-cultural parody—in the prestige landscape format that became the series' signature. Its inclusion of a real-life media personality (Siewert Öholm) as a satirical character is characteristic of Darnell's recurring habit of embedding sharp contemporary Swedish cultural commentary into an ostensibly Stone Age setting, a device that gives the series unusual topicality for a humor comic set in prehistory.
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Herman Hedning first appeared in January 1988 in issue #1 of Fantomen, the Swedish edition of The Phantom, where it ran as a back-up strip—initially in black and white, switching to color alongside Fantomen in 1991. Creator Jonas Darnell both wrote and drew all strips; the series launched its annual julalbum format in 1990 (with regular annual Christmas albums firmly established from 1993 onward), published throughout the 1990s by Semic Press AB in Sundbyberg. The 1994 julalbum, the third in the annual sequence, was produced before the strip gained its own dedicated magazine (which launched under Egmont in 1998), meaning all content at this stage was drawn from the Fantomen back-up strips.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Semic Press AB, Sundbyberg, Sweden; first edition 1994; full-color landscape (liggande) format, 26×19 cm, 50 pages.
- Written and drawn entirely by Jonas Darnell, the sole creator of the Herman Hedning strip since its 1988 debut.
- Third installment in the annual Herman Hedning & Co julalbum series; the Christmas album tradition for this title began in 1990 and continued annually through at least 2025.
- All strip content reprinted from Herman Hedning's run as a back-up feature in the Swedish Phantom magazine Fantomen, where it debuted in issue #1/1988.
- The indexed cast reflects Darnell's full core ensemble: Herman (the protagonist), Gammelman ('Old Man,' the genius inventor), Lilleman ('Little Man,' the put-upon everyman), Ragnar (Herman's dinosaur drinking buddy), Djävulen (the Devil, the series' chief recurring villain), Adam, Eva, and Skaparen (the Creator—Darnell's parodic take on the Christian God).
- Siewert Öholm—indexed as a character—was a real Swedish television presenter and conservative public debater active on Sveriges Television; his appearance reflects Darnell's regular practice of caricaturing prominent Swedish media and cultural figures within the strip's prehistoric setting.
- The julalbum format is part of a long Swedish publishing tradition of annual Christmas comics albums; Herman Hedning's entry in this tradition became one of the few titles to establish itself as a perennial alongside Bamse, Hälge, and Fantomen.
- The strip was also published in Norway (in Fantomet) and later in Hungary (Kretén, under the title Herman és tsai), giving the series an international reach unusual for a Swedish humor strip of this era.