Valhalla (comics) - History

History

During 1976 and 1977, Henning Kure and Arne Stenby at Interpresse, a Danish publishing house, were planning to create a comic series based on the world of the Vikings. They offered the place of illustrating the comic to the young cartoonist Peter Madsen, who accepted, and also enlisted Hans Rancke-Madsen, a writer who had shown great skill at writing dialogue and characters. The team set out to draw the first album (similar format as Tintin and Asterix) in a series of the adventures of the Norse gods, based on the Elder Eddas. Thor would very much be the hero of this series, along with Odin and Loki, Odin's blood brother.

Valhalla started in 1978 as a strip running in the Danish newspaper "Politiken". The first album came out in 1979. It was very well received, with several subsequent albums.

The tone of the albums has focused on humor, but the characters, and much of the plot, are based on the stories and legends in the Elder Eddas, and many albums have often featured deeper human issues. The albums are of high quality, and each took one or several years to produce. The first album was released in 1979, the second in 1982, and the thirteenth in 2006. They are very much in the tradition of finely drawn and well plotted Franco-Belgian comics like Tintin or Asterix, which also served as inspiration for the Valhalla comics.

On January 5 2007, Valhalla was published on the Internet for the first time as the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten began publishing the 14th album, Muren ("The Wall"), in their online edition. One page is posted weekly in the form of an animated Flash program, attempting to transfer the large album pages to a format suitable for the web.