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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