Customer Reviews

THE WIZARD KING TRILOGY 1 PB: The King of the World

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This material originally appeared in black and white and apparently Wood's wife Tatjana colorized it. Although the coloring is mostly fine, she appears to have worried about nudity and painted one-piece bathing suits onto female figures! It's not QUITE the equivalent of painting pants on the Sistine Chapel figures - but only because this is not some of Wallace Wood's best work! A few pages are simply oversized text or blown-up sketches. Another irritation is the publisher's reminders of the material we missed by not buying the deluxe edition (the 'picto-fiction' version of the story, available in its entirety in "Woodwork" and partially sprinkled through this edition to pad out the volume!!!)

"Wally" Wood was one of the greatest comic-book artists of the 20th century, standing directly alongside greats Jack Kirby and Will Eisner. Famed for his amazingly detailed sci-fi work, particularly for EC comics, Wood also created some marvelous heroic fantasy for the Marvel and Warren lines. Frustrated by low pay and corporate-art strictures Wood created the "pro-zine" Witzend in 1966. A predecessor of `adult' comix like HEAVY METAL, the magazine published experimental and controversial material, including the stories collected here.

Wood recognized the popularity of Tolkien-esque fantasy and "The Wizard King" was intended to be an irreverent take on the genre, with anti-heroic characters and ironic plot twists. Unfortunately there's a lot of repetition and the story never even quite meets the standard set by his stories in the mainstream Marvel title, "Tower of Shadows." Wood's fantasies for EERIE and CREEPY are much better - the influence of writer Archie Goodwin is missing here.