Okay, I'm going to have to admit to some bias when reviewing the Harold Hedd comic books. Rand Holmes is one of my favorite underground comic creators, so I tend to enjoy his work no matter what he does. But there's no need for embellishment when it comes to evaluating comics featuring Holmes' signature character, Harold Hedd. Hedd was the penultimate Canadian hippie hero in Vancouver, appearing in the weekly underground newspaper
The Georgia Straight from 1971 to '73. Hedd also starred in his own comic book titles; two from the '70s and two from the '80s, all of which are reviewed here. All four of the books are remarkable and I don't need to apologize for giving every one of them perfect scores.
Holmes was born in a small town in Nova Scotia but grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, where he worked as a sign painter in a print shop. On the side, he developed a comic strip for a local hot rod magazine and in 1964 he sold a couple of spot cartoons to
Help! magazine. In 1965, Holmes did some work for Pete Millar's
Rod & Custom magazine while vacationing in Los Angeles, but his cartooning jobs were irregular. In fact, he stopped doing cartoons altogether for a period in the mid '60s.
But the advent of the hippie culture in the mid '60s had a big impact on Holmes. After his brother turned him on to psychedelic drugs in 1968, Holmes left his wife and job in Edmonton and relocated to Vancouver, where he moved into a communal house, grew his hair down to his ass, and lived a non-stop hippie lifestyle for about a year. As he related to Patrick Rosenkranz in
Rebel Visions, Holmes "...was experimenting with grass and acid, going to rock concerts, spending all night on the local beaches drifting from campfire to campfire, the whole beach tripping on acid -- a wonderful magical time."
During this magical time, Holmes also began drawing again, which led to a fortuitous event that changed the course of his life once again. In 1970, one of the women Holmes was living with got a part-time job at
The Georgia Straight. During a staff meeting (which were very informal), somebody at the
Straight suggested they should have a comic strip like the
Freak Brothers, and the woman piped up, "I know a guy who can draw where I live." Holmes had sold one other "non-Hedd" strip to the
Straight in the past, but he only got $10 for it. After bringing in his first Harold Hedd strip, the
Straight offered him $25 a week to keep 'em coming. The money sucked, but Holmes loved the editorial freedom, so between May of '71 and April of '72, there was a new Hedd strip almost every week. Harold Hedd became the everyman hero of the emerging counterculture in Vancouver, which was just as ladled with drugs, free love and hippie shenanigans as the counterculture in the U.S.
Harold Hedd's character and his stories are explored in greater detail in the reviews of the individual comic books, but the weekly strips made
The Georgia Straight even more popular than before.
In fact, when the publishers realized just how popular Harold Hedd was, they doubled Holmes' fee to $50 a week, which was just enough for the frugal Holmes to live on. In 1972, the
Straight published a compilation of strips in
The Collected Adventures of Harold Hedd, which sold well in Canada and across the border. This led to Holmes moving down to San Francisco in 1973 with the complete artwork for
Harold Hedd #2. Holmes had always felt a kindred spirit with the other underground comic creators, and felt it was time to end his physical isolation from his brethren.
In September of that year, Last Gasp reprinted
The Collected Adventures and published
Harold Hedd #2, and both books would be reprinted many times in the next 20+ years. However, according to Holmes, his relationship with Ron Turner and Last Gasp did not go so well.
Holmes reported to Rosenkranz that when Last Gasp didn't pay him his royalties for the second issue of
Harold Hedd for six months, he gave up and moved back to Canada in 1974. "The incident sort of took the heart out of me," Holmes said. "I lost all trust in publishers in general and just couldn't get the energy up to do any more books. What was the point? $25 a page was a stipend anyway, and then they couldn't be bothered to do that." The amount of effort Holmes poured into every page of his comics certainly made it harder for him to justify working full time in the comic book industry. Though he contributed a couple of stories to Ron Turner's
Slow Death while still living in San Francisco, his output became quite sporadic in the following years.