Vanhat herrat is a Finnish

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

 comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 drawn by Pauli Heikkilä and written by him and Markku Paretskoi. It was frequently featured in the popular humour magazine Pahkasika

Pahkasika

Pahkasika was a Finnish adult humour magazine, edited by Markku Paretskoi and published from 1975 to 2000.Unlike the British adult humour comic Viz and the Nordic adult humour magazine Pyton/Myrkky, Pahkasika did not include much pornography despite sometimes very ribald jokes...

, Paretskoi being the magazine's executive editor for its entire run. While preliminary versions of the characters first appeared in a Tampere

Tampere

Tampere is a city in southern Finland. It is the most populous inland city in any of the Nordic countries. The city has a population of , growing to approximately 300,000 people in the conurbation and over 340,000 in the metropolitan area. Tampere is the third most-populous municipality in...

 journalism

Journalism

Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 students' union magazine in 1977, it is generally considered that the characters reached their mature form in 1982. The creators of the strip were awarded the Finnish Comic Society's "Puupää

Pekka Puupää

Pekka Puupää is a Finnish comic and film character, created by Ola "Fogeli" Fogelberg. The character appeared 1925–1975 in the popular comic Pekka Puupää and 1952–1960 in thirteen films produced by Suomen Filmiteollisuus...

 hat" award in 1998.

In 1998–1999 the strip appeared weekly in the urban newspaper Tamperelainen, but in 2000 Pahkasika was discontinued, and the strip has been on hiatus since 2002. That year, all strips from 1982 onwards were collected in a single 222-page volume, "Taru Vanhoista herroista" ("The Legend of the Old Gentlemen" - a play on the name of the Finnish translation of The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...

), ISBN 952-9809-56-5.

The strip stars two Finnish men seemingly in their early thirties. Their real names are never given, they are simply called "the blond gentleman" and "the dark-haired gentleman" because of their hair colour. Occasionally, a third main character, their uncle (called the Uncle), also appears. In one episode, the gentlemen also have a son whom they kidnapped from his mother while she was shopping. The son makes short one- or two-frame appearances also in the latter episodes.

Most of the strips are about the main characters having some sort of fantasy adventure, as if reliving their childhood

Childhood

Childhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...

 or teenage. These adventures were often rather eccentric, such as one set in Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

's Walden

Walden

Walden is an American book written by noted Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau...

. They also flaunt their literacy in a strip where they meet author Veikko Huovinen

Veikko Huovinen

Veikko Huovinen was a Finnish novelist known for his realism, pacifism, sharp intellect, and peculiar humor. He wrote 37 books.-Early life:...

 and incense him by talking exclusively in sentences which contain the title of one of his books.

The gentlemen also frequently drink alcoholic beverage

Alcoholic beverage

An alcoholic beverage is a drink containing ethanol, commonly known as alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are divided into three general classes: beers, wines, and spirits. They are legally consumed in most countries, and over 100 countries have laws regulating their production, sale, and consumption...

s. The nature of their adventures may be understood as the authors' documentation of their own lives as undergraduate university students.

In one strip, it has been shown that both men have a girlfriend. The blond gentleman's girlfriend has dark hair and the dark-haired gentleman's girlfriend is blonde.

Vanhat herrat has not been translated into English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, save for a single page which Pahkasika featured in both Finnish and English.