Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Black and White Wednesday: "A Tale of Sword & Sorcery" by Hicks and Simonson

Hail, Groove-ophiles! Today we're gonna truck back to April 1974, to the first fab ish of Mike Friedrich's "ground level" (not Underground, not newsstand) comic, Star*Reach, and the wonderment provided by Ed Hicks and Walt Simonson's "A Tale of Sword and Sorcery"! It's a cool humor/satire piece pointed straight at the burgeoning sword and sorcery genre, a romp that allowed Walt to get a bit "wild and wooly" in the art department (which is always fun to see!). And dig that ka-razee comic strip, dedicated to Walt's then partner-in-comics on DC's Manhunter, Archie Goodwin, that runs along the bottom of the story!












(Story and art are still copyright 1974 Walter Simonson!)
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3 comments:

  1. pete doreeJuly 9, 2014 at 3:37 AM

    Good one, yeah. Walt did this originally while still at college, I seem to remember, and had to add the 2nd strip 'cos he hadn't drawn it comic page size, so had to fill in that excess white space.

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  2. Edo BosnarJuly 9, 2014 at 6:22 AM

    Thanks for this, Groove. It's wonderful to see some of this early, obscure Simonson art. Also interesting is that Simonson never seemed to have any kind of learning curve - his work was pretty much awesome right from the start!

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  3. AnonymousJuly 10, 2014 at 2:14 PM

    That ending has a certain Ralph Bakshi "Wizards" flair to it.

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


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