18th October 1958 – The Wizard

Description

An original vintage comic from 18th October 1958 in good condition.

The Wizard

The Wizard was launched as a weekly British story paper on 22 September 1922, published by D. C. Thomson & Co. It was merged with The Rover in September 1963, becoming Rover and Wizard. The last issue of the original Wizard was number 1,970, Rover And Wizard continued until the Wizard name was dropped – becoming The Rover in August 1969. The Wizard was relaunched on 14 February 1970, and continued until 10 June 1978.

Wilson the Wonder Athlete

Wilson the Wonder Athlete was a British comic strip, first published in 1943 in the British illustrated story paper The Wizard published by D. C. Thomson & Co.. It follows the sporting adventures of a heroic character named William Wilson. The stories were written by Gilbert Lawford Dalton and drawn by Jack Glass. The stories ran until 1984 in various British magazines.

Publication history

The character first appeared in issue 1029 Wizard (24 July 1943) in a story titled “The Truth About Wilson”. The first adventure introduced Wilson as a supreme athlete, who joins a race from out of the crowd and manages to record a three-minute mile. The character’s adventures were written by Gilbert Lawford Dalton using the pen name W S K Webb, and a book, The Truth About Wilson collected a number of the text stories in the 1960s.

Thought by Paul Gravett to be the prototype of the “astonishing sporting prodigies” who became popular in British comics, (cf. Alf Tupper, Roy of the Rovers), Gravett describes him as an “unassuming totally dedicated loner, [wanting] no glory or publicity”. Although his stories were initially told in prose, a move to the comic papers The Hornet and Hotspur saw the character depicted in comic strip form.

The character was later revived for D.C. Thomson’s Spike comic of 1983 to 1984, initially within a comic strip with art by Neville Wilson. Referred to as The Man in Black, the character was revealed to be Wilson in the course of the story, with reprints of the older material published within the comic as Wilson’s diaries.

Extracts from Wikipedia.