Gary and Bob, Hägar’s Ghost Cartoonists – but mostly Gary

Bob Weber, Jr., he of Slylock Fox fame, and Gary Hallgren, he of Air Pirates Funnies fame, have been friends and coworkers for going on forty years. Their latest partnership has been Hägar the Horrible for the past decade.

Bob Weber, Jr. began writing gags and scripts for the Hägar comic strip in 2014 and Bob hit up Gary Hallgren to draw them as “roughs” to send them to The Browne family for approval. Then Chris Browne would draw the strip and Dick Hodgins, Jr. would ink it.

As Gary relates in an interview with Denis Kitchen from last year, not long after he and Bob partnered on Hägar Dick Hodgins, Jr. could not continue so Gary became the inker, and then fairly quickly Chris Browne pretty much retired from the comic strip and Gary ended up being both penciller and inker (with both reporting to producers/editors Chance and Deborah Browne).

In the interview Gary mentions that though he is not allowed to sign the strip – the Browne brand being much too valuable to abandon – he does occasionally sneak in a monogram, thus in a small way laying claim to the strip. This seems to have started in the Fall of 2020.

Now Sean Kleefeld has taken a close look at the art on Hägar and thinks another artist has been added.

[E]arlier this month, I [saw] the Hägar strip that ran on July 4 … 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.

Sean noticed more:

[C]ompare these two strips that ran on March 11 and 20 of last year…

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.

Sean does a deep dive into the strip and the background of its contributors and makes some suggestions as to who may be assisting or sometimes substituting Gary on the strip.

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.