Hagar the Horrible was a beloved comic strip in my family while I was growing up. Hagar's Gleason-esque Viking warrior and his sitcom family were always good for a laugh, and Hagar himself was a decent proxy for our own father - rough and tough and tender underneath once you got past the bluster. His overbearing Wagnerian wife Helga, sexy/vapid daughter Honi, and precociously intellectual son Hamlet have him no end of trouble, but the funniest parts of the strip often came from his sad-sack right-hand man, the flaccid and luckless Lucky Eddie.
Full name Fortuitous Eduardo, Lucky Eddie was the antithesis of the prototypical Viking. Small, weak, cowardly, insipid, sensitive, he bungled the most basic instructions when sailing a longboat or besieging a castle or tying his shoes. He was totally loyal to Hagar and his family, likely unable to function at all without Hagar, like a barnacle on a whale.
And yet there was a childlike sweetness to Lucky Eddie, a charming lack of guile as he faced a violent and complex world without ambition. His expectations were low, and so he reveled in the simple things like coming home alive from a raid, or a drink at the tavern with his boss/friend. Maybe we could all learn something from that. Maybe Lucky Eddie was a little fortuitous after all.
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