The News Sentinel is launching a new comic Monday. It is called “WuMo” after the names of its creators, Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler. These two Danes have been building their strip over the past eight years from an underground following to one of the hottest funnies in Europe. Now it is debuting in the United States.

You could think of “WuMo” as similar to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen — if Andersen’s works were filled with malicious beavers, suburban angst and Star Wars characters. In fact, “WuMo” is more in the tradition of “The Far Side,” Gary Larson’s iconic panel, which was discontinued in 1995.
Wulff and Morgenthaler are creative dynamos. They have a comedy website that is the biggest in Scandinavia. Their animated sitcom “The Pandas” has become so popular in three seasons in Denmark that they are in negotiations to bring it to North America. The two even won an award for the best illustrated cookbook at this year’s Gourmand Awards in Paris.
Wulff, the writer for the strip, is a stand-up comic who has done his own TV and radio shows. Morgenthaler, the illustrator, is also a movie director who is now producing a drama called “Petit” starring Kim Basinger.
The strip takes the spot of “Rex Morgan, M.D,” one of the News Sentinel’s long-running comics that have lost popularity in recent years. A soap-opera style strip, “Rex” started in 1948 and has been through a series of creators and artists since then.