Imagine George H. W. Bush referring to Bill Clinton as the White House’s own Fritz the Cat, or Jimmy Carter calling Ronald Reagan the fourth Freak Brother. This highly unlikely scenario came true during a debate on energy politics in the Swedish parliament in 1990. Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, a state bureaucrat with the charisma of a rock, called Carl Bildt, the leader of the Conservative Party, the opposition’s own Socker-Conny ["Sugar-Conny"], after the alternative cartoonist Joakim Pirinen’s brusque antihero. Given that Carlsson, close to 60 years old at the time, was not known for his deep knowledge of popular culture in general and alternative comics in particular, it seems fair to say that his choice of insult was rather surprising. At the same time, it speaks volumes of how deeply Pirinen’s character had established itself in the public consciousness only a few years after its debut. The album Socker-Conny, published in 1985 under the auspices of the magazine Galago, was not only Pirinen’s breakthrough, it was something rarer: a commercially successful alternative comic.