The King is a Fink

The Wizard of Id’s co-creator Brant Parker has died at 86, a week after the strip’s writer Johnny Hart also died. I might not have been marking their passing if it weren’t for the fact that I grew up in a time and place owned by Parker and Hart: The Wizard of Id was the only daily strip carried by The Mercury, the daily newspaper of southern Tasmania, throughout the 1970s and 1980s; the only strip of any kind that it carried for most of that time, in fact. That and its editorial cartoonist Kev Bailey were the only regular exposure to newspaper cartooning we had. Not for us, the glory days of Peanuts or the early days of Calvin and Hobbes—let alone anything Australian. We didn’t even get those first few months of Garfield that were actually any good. It was just Rodney, the Wizard, Blanch, Bung, Spook, and the fink. No wonder I used to marvel at the luxurious comics supplements of the Sunday papers on visits to my grandparents in Sydney.

Read More · 18 April 2007

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