Hart placed a few in The Saturday Evening Post, but his big break came in 1958, when B.C., a comic strip about sarcastic cavemen, was picked up by Comic Creators’ Syndicate. Soon he was being lauded as the most promising of the new crop of hip young comic artists.
Always an iconoclast, he presaged Doonesbury in introducing political satire into his daily strips. In his later years, he became a fundamentalist Christian, and started having his cavemen voice his beliefs. How do prehistoric cavemen even know about Good Friday?
A few years later, Hart approached Brant Parker, who had remained a close friend, and again breaking tradition, asked him to collaborate on a strip about the sarcastic residents of a Medieval kingdom; The Wizard of Id began in 1964, and continues today, the work of Brandt's son Jeff Parker and Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni.
We didn't get the strip in the Rock Island Argus, but I found it in dozens of small paperback collections published during the 1970s: The Peasants are Revolting ("you can say that again"), Remember the Golden Rule, The Wizard's Back, Every Man is Innocent Until Proven Broke, I'm Off to See the Wizard ("you'd have to be").
Though named after the inept Wizard, Wizard of Id is an ensemble strip, involving the daily interactions of many strongly drawn characters:
Troub, a hippie troubadour
Bung, the drunken court jester
Spook, who has been in the dungeon for so long that he is a mass of hair
Tthe Lone Haraunger, who scrawls his slogan, “The King is a Fink,” under the King’s nose
Robbing Hood, who “takes from the wretch, and gives to the peer”
Rodney, a cowardly knight.
Id is a decidedly male preserve where women are demonized or simply ignored: the Wizard’s wife Blanche is the fat, ugly harridan who figures so prominently in the sets of Borscht Belt comedians, and the Lady Gwen has no strong personality traits, and seems to exist simply to express an unrequited love for Rodney. Eschewing the heterosexual hijinks that preoccupy the minds of most characters in non-nuclear family strips, from Peanuts to Garfield and even Johnny Hart’s earlier B.C., residents of Id spend most of their time buddy-bonding.
When Rodney is released from a curse that turned him into a statue, it is Bung, not the Lady Gwen, who joyfully reunited with him.
Yodey, a dumb but massive squire, treats Rodney with an admiration that treads the line between hero worship and romance. Even the King, who never expresses interest in women, rarely appears without Rodney or the Duke at his side.
The buddy-bonding alone made The Wizard of Id a welcome relief from the "girls! girls! girls!" we saw on tv, in movies, in comics -- well, everywhere else. But it gets better: there's a gay-vague character.
More after the break
The Lady Gwen spends her life ardently pursuing Rodney, who acquiesces to a few dates, but otherwise displays no interest in her. Rodney’s lack of heterosexual interest is blatantly queer coded.
In Long Live the King (1975), Rodney takes Gwen out for a movie and a sundae, and “in appreciation,” she kisses him. He walks away unimpressed, thinking “Now I wish I’d gotten the butterscotch.” sundae flavor?
In The Peasants Are Revolting (1971), at the end of another date, Rodney refuses the kiss. Exasperated, Gwen exclaims “I’m a girl, you’re a boy! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” Rodney responds: “Yeah, you can beat the draft.”
Sometimes the subtext moves directly into text. In The Wizard of Id: Yield (1974), Rodney and Gwen are sitting in a bar when a tough approaches them and asks “How about a kiss?” Rodney asks him to step outside. We assume, of course, that he is going to fight the tough for flirting with Gwen. But he returns a short time later, sits down, and says “If I had kissed him in here, people would have laughed at me.”
