Hälge
Created by Lars Mortimer
Hälge is Swedens most popular moose! Hundreds of thousands of readers follow his melancholy comic strips daily. Hälge lives in the forest, in the village of ”Avliden”, where the hunting seasons are spent on the run. He has to resort to all kinds of tricks to survive, but in his own philosophical way, he always makes it through. In the winter, Hälge is depressed over losing his horns, but even the summer offers countless opportunities to moon about…
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Pia Lindén
Senior Brand & Sales Manager
+40 000 Followers
on Facebook
133 000 Readers
per issue of the Hälge magazine
Daily Published
in over 50 Swedish newspapers
+80 Different Publishers
in Swedish newspapers over the years
Egmont Publishing
owns the rights to Hälge since 2015
Magazine for 25 years
The Hälge Magazine has been published every month since 2000
The story of Hälge
Lars Mortimer (1946–2014) came up with the idea for Hälge during a car journey in the back seat of a Volvo 245 between Alfta and Falun. His first thought was a moose and a hunting dog on two legs, as well as a hunter. These three should somehow be able to communicate with each other, he thought. When he got home after the drive, he already had a lot of ideas about how the series should look graphically. He sat down at his desk and slowly but surely began to sketch the character Hälge.
A year later, in the fall of 1991, the series premiered in the newspapers Svensk Jakt and Åsa-Nisse. The first album was released in 1992, marking the beginning of the joyful and humorous carousel that has become a part of everyday life today.
The Hälge series usually consists of short strips of one to four comic strips intended to be published in daily newspapers. For the Sunday editions, Lars drew special weekly pages right from the start, with more boxes and a more detailed plot, and sometimes even episodes are drawn on a few pages directly for the comic book. The humor and greatness of Hälge stem from its simple, familiar cast of characters. For many Swedes, Hälge has become a series that they engage with daily, year after year, revisiting it like a dear friend in the morning paper or other editions.
