Hegen

(Hannes Hegen, German illustrator and comic artist)

Ten years ago, on 8 November 2014, Hannes Hegen died at 89 years. He was a comic artist, and he was a pioneer – not a pioneer on a global level, to be sure, but rather a local hero: it should be fair to contend that he brought comic culture to East Germany when in late 1955 he launched the magazine »Mosaik«. Its three ageless main protagonists, the Digedags – and later on their successors, the Abrafaxe (after Hegen had quit the Mosaik team) – were the darlings of generations of East German kids. And the magazine is still alive and kicking!

I was among the ardent fans of the Mosaik comics and revelled in the adventures in far-away times and countries of the Abrafaxe and (via the older collection of an uncle and lately by a growing collection of reprints) of the Digedags. And I got endless fun and inspiration from them, not least by copying the drawings and thus training my own skills.