Valhalla is a Danish comic book series based on Elder Edda. Comics in a humorous style describe the adventures of the characters of Scandinavian mythology.
The series was founded in 1978 by Danish artist Peter Madsen and continues to this day. Currently (November 2009) 15 issues have been published.
The series was published in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish, Dutch, German and Indonesian.
In 1986, based on the comic book, a full-length cartoon of the same name was created.
History
In 1976, Henning Kure and Arne Stenby , with Danish Publishing House , planned a series of Viking comic books. The place of the illustrator was offered to the young animator Peter Madsen, who not only gave his consent, but also involved in the work on the comic strip Hans Rancke-Madsen, a writer who showed great talent in writing dialogs for characters. Valhalla was released in 1978 as a strip in the Danish newspaper Politiken. The first extrabudgetary episode of the comic was released in 1979. It was very well received by readers, as well as several subsequent issues. The tone for the comics was set openly humorous, but despite this, the characters and most of the plot are based on stories and legends from Elder Edda. In terms of graphics, the Valhalla comics are designed very well. They feature many of the artistic traditions of the Franco-Belgian comics, such as Tintin or Asterix, which no doubt served as a source of inspiration when working on Valhalla. More than one year of labor was spent on each episode. The first episode was 1979, the second, three years later, in 1982, and the thirteenth in 2006. On January 5, 2007, Valhalla was first published on the Internet, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten began publishing an online version of the fourteenth issue.
Creators
Valhalla was a major breakthrough for her illustrator Peter Madsen, who became well known for his work on the series. Peter is by far the most important member of the team, and it’s not without reason that the comic is usually referred to as “Valhalla Peter Madsen”. Hans Ranke-Madsen was the main writer of the series, along with Peter and other co-authors, Per Vadmand and Henning Kure. Ranke-Madsen wrote dialogues for all issues except the eleventh and twelfth, but returned to work again in the thirteenth. Coloring has always been an important point in the design of Valhalla. The first eight issues were painted by Soren Hakonsson. Peter Madsen painted the ninth issue on his own, and from the tenth to the twelfth painted Jesper Ejsing. Hakksson again set to work in the thirteenth edition, in which he worked on half the pages. Madsen worked on the second half.