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The winged blue horse who starred in the 2013 comic series Happy! may have originated in a sketch that co-creator Darick Robertson made at age four.
An image that Happy! co-creator Darick Robertson drew when he was a child bears an uncanny resemblance to the titular winged blue unicorn of the surreal 2013 comic.
“Did I imagine Happy! when I was only 4 years old?” Robertson wrote on Twitter, sharing a childhood sketch of a grinning equine who looked an awful lot like Happy the Horse, minus the wings and horn. “Found this today in an old note pad of my Mother’s…”
While the resemblance is likely only a coincidence, the bizarre horse’s status as an imaginary friend for children makes the fact that Robertson drew the sketch at age four oddly appropriate.
Over the course of Grant Morrison and Robertson’s series — originally envisioned as a gritty story vaguely influenced by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life — Happy the Horse appeared in front of ex-cop turned hitman Nick Sax, who suffered from deep cynicism, eczema, a failed marriage and a general hatred towards life.
Nick initially dismissed Happy the Horse as a drug-induced hallucination, but eventually developed a begrudging respect for the strange creature. Over the course of four issues, Nick found himself stuck in a Christmas conspiracy involving the mafia, a child pornography ring run by a pedophile dressed as Santa Claus and dozens of gangsters trying to gun him down. Through it all, Happy was a constant companion that flitted about Nick’s head to keep him company, at one point arguing that Nick needed to learn how to hope in spite of the filthy noir world that he inhabited.
Happy!, which was originally published by Image Comics, received a SyFy television series in 2017, and was the first of Grant Morrison’s works to make the transition from comics to live action. The adaptation ran until 2019 and starred Christopher Meloni as Nick Sax and Patton Oswalt as the voice of Happy. It deviated substantially from Morrison and Robertson’s work by upping the supernatural elements — for instance, including aliens and demons, and even hinting that Happy the Horse was a god of sorts. The show’s second season was also a completely new story which continued the holiday theme of the series, focusing on Easter instead of Christmas, but low ratings caused its eventual cancellation with a number of cliffhangers unresolved.
Source: Twitter
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