The Wizard of Id
The Wizard of Id is a daily newspaper comic strip created by American cartoonists Brant Parker and Johnny Hart. Beginning November 16, 1964, the strip follows the antics of a large cast of characters in a shabby medieval kingdom called "Id". The title is a play on "The Wizard of Oz", combined with the Freudian psychological term "id", which represents the instinctive and primal part of the human psyche. In 1997, Brant Parker passed his illustrator's duties on to his son, Jeff Parker, who had already been involved with creating "I d" for a decade. In 2002, the strip appeared in some 1,000 newspapers all over the world, syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni took over writing duties on the strip after Hart's death in 2007. The new byline, "B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart," appeared for the first time in another of their strips on January 3, 2010. On December 14, 2015, Jeff Parker also passed his duties on to Mastroianni. Overview. History. In the early 1960s, Johnny Hart, having already created the successful "B.C.", began collaborating with his friend, then-unpublished cartoonist Brant Parker, on a  new comic strip. (Parker would later create or co-create the strips "Goosemyer", "Crock" and "Out of Bounds".) Having already drawn cartoons about the Stone Age, Hart advanced through time to the Middle Ages, taking the idea from a deck of playing cards. "The Wizard of Id" was first syndicated on November 16, 1964, drawn by Parker and co-written by Parker and Hart. On November 17, 2014, the strip formally celebrated its 50th anniversary, and a number of other strips, including "Beetle Bailey", "BC", "Ballard Street", "Dennis the Menace", "Garfield", "Mother Goose and Grimm", "Pickles", "Mutts", "Pooch Café , The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee", and "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith" ran special 50th anniversary commemorative strips (e.g., Beetle called Sarge "a fink," and ended up sharing a dungeon cell with Spookingdorf). "Hi and Lois" ran an otherwise-ordinary strip with a portrait of the Wizard in the last panel, while "Speed Bump" ran a cartoon of Harry Potter in a Wizard of Id T-shirt, "Family Circus" put a greeting on a book (being held upside down), and "Blondie" showed a greeting written on a cake in the first panel. Setting. "The Wizard of Id" deals  with the goings-on of the rundown and oppressed mythical kingdom of Id. It follows people from all corners of the kingdom, but concentrates on the court of a tyrannical, dwarfish monarch known only as "the King". The strip's humor occasionally satirizes modern American culture, and deliberate anachronisms are rampant. Technology changes to suit whatever a gag requires; a battle with spears and arrows might be followed by a peasant using an ATM. In some strips the king is elected to his monarchial position (albeit through rigged ballots). The aspects that stay the same, however, are that Id  is in the middle of nowhere, home to a large castle surrounded by a moat. The king and his subjects run an inept army perpetually at war with "the Huns", while the unhappy, overtaxed peasants (or "Idiots") make little money as farmers and stablehands to keep modest lifestyles. Format. "The Wizard of Id" follows a gag-a-day format, plus a color Sunday page. There are running gags relating to the main cast, to a variety of secondary, continuing characters, and to the kingdom itself. Occasionally it will run an extended sequence on a given theme over a week  or two. Style. According to Don Markstein's "Toonopedia" "The strip's humor style—quite contemporary, in contrast to its medieval setting—ranges from broad and low to pure black". The style in which certain characters are drawn has changed from the early years of the strip to today. For example, the old style of the King's head was more rectangular, he had a crown with identifiable card suits on it (club, diamond, heart), his mustache and beard always hid his mouth, and his beard frequently extended to a curved point when the King was shown in profile (see  The Wondrous Wizard of Id, 1970, Fawcett Publications). In the new style, the King's head is more trapezoidal with a slightly smaller and undecorated crown, he has a huge nose (even bigger than Rodney's) which covers his mouth and chin, and when he opens his mouth it appears that his beard has been shaved off. On December 14, 2015, Mason Mastroianni took over the strip from Jeff Parker. Cast of characters. Supporting characters. In addition to the main cast, several recurring jokes have run throughout the life of the comic strip for which certain characters come back  from time to time. In other media. In 1969, Jim Henson and Don Sahlin produced a test pilot for "The Wizard of Id". By the time interest was expressed in the concept Henson was deeply involved in other projects and decided to not pursue it any further. The comic was also adapted into a cartoon short in 1970, produced by Chuck Jones, directed by Abe Levitow and with voices from Paul Winchell and Don Messick. Paul Williams in the early 1980s touted an Id feature film as upcoming in talk show appearances. "I wanted to do The Wizard  of Id as a feature. I went up to Endicott, New York and stayed with Johnny Hart, who became a really good friend, and actually made a deal with Columbia Pictures to do Wizard of Id as a feature. I was going to play the king. Then that whole David Begelman thing happened and it all fell apart." Characters from the comic were featured in two educational computer games released in 1984, "The Wizard of Id's WizMath" and "The Wizard of Id's WizType". Awards. "The Wizard of Id" was named best humor strip  by the National Cartoonists Society in 1971, 1976, 1980, 1982 and 1983. In 1984, Parker received a Reuben Award for his work on the strip. Dozens of paperback collections have been published since 1965, and some of the older titles were still in print as of 2010. In 2009, Titan Books began re-publishing the strips and is printing the complete daily and Sunday strips starting with 1971, publishing one annual collection per year.