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The Hägar The Horrible Strip That Inspires Joe Biden Every Day

Joe Biden released this photo by Adam Schultz, official photographer for Joe Biden of a video call between Biden and Kamla Harris to officially announce that Kamala was his Vice Presidential pick for the upcoming 2020 US Presidential Election.

The Comic Book Strip That Inspires Joe Biden Every Day
Photo by Adam Schultz for the Joe Biden Presidential Campaign.

In it, you could see a framed and mounted comic book strip sitting on Biden's desk. It was rapidly identified as this Hägar The Horrible strip by Dik Browne.

It features Hägar stranded on a rock as his ship is sinking, burnt by lightning, as the rain pours down. "Why me?!" he cried, to the response of a skybound god, "Why not?"

Two years ago, Joe Biden told PBS Biden said he had kept the cartoon on his desk for decades. He mentions a letter that Ted Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, had written to a friend who lost his son in World War II, saying he went through the "Why? Why me? Why did this happen? … What's the purpose of life?" that so often accompanies grief. In the letter, Joe Kennedy suggests that the purpose of his life was to think about what his son would have been doing if he were still alive and dedicate himself to that.

Joe Biden lost his wife and one-year-old daughter in 1972 just after his first Senate and decades later, when his son Beau died of brain cancer. And that this drives the purpose behind the cartoon he keeps on his desk. and that it is a reminder that "a lot of people are going through a lot worse than you're going through, and the way they get through it is … they have people reach out, touch them, give them solace."

Obama was quite the fan of comic book storytelling as well, of course. Obama got a Spider-Man appearance and cover – if Joe Biden wins, maybe he can make an appearance in Hägar The Horrible?

Hägar the Horrible first appeared in February 1973 and after Dik Browne's retirement in 1988, his son Chris Browne has continued the strip. The strip is a caricature commenting on modern-day life in the United States through a loose interpretation of Viking Age Scandinavian life. How might Joe Biden make a cameo?


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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