Two manuscripts from the 1963 comic magazine "Mosaik", which were thought to have been lost, have been found in the estate of Hannes Hegen. They had not been published because the GDR publisher Junge Welt took an increasingly critical view of the storyline, according to Mosaik Steinchen für Steinchen Verlag in Berlin. On May 16, Hegen's 100th birthday, one of the two 62-year-old episodes featuring the three goblins Dig, Dag and Digedag will now be published posthumously.
The inventor series was then prematurely discontinued in 1964. Completed text manuscripts, exposés and character designs were preserved in Hannes Hegen's archive. He also left behind a huge archive of books that are still useful for researching historical buildings and uniforms, for example.
The two former Mosaic illustrators Ulf S. Graupner and Steffen Jähde have now created the episode "Duel on the Neva" to match the text manuscripts from Hegen's estate. "It was traditionally drawn by hand," explained Löffler. However, the drawings were then digitally assembled and colored. The issue will be published as a May special, in addition to the regular "Mosaik" issue.
The "Mosaik" was first published in East Berlin in December 1955. It was always sold out immediately until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The reason: Hegen's three clever heroes did not spread socialist propaganda, but took the reader around the world and into the most diverse eras - for example to ancient Rome.
