Early on, some comic strip artists spotted what a handy vehicle for subversive satire the superhero genre could be.
“In many ways, the hippies of the 1960s descended from an earlier American counterculture: the Beat Generation,” observed Sarah Pruitt at History.com. “This group of young bohemians, most famously including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, made a name for themselves in the 1940s and ’50s with their rejection of prevailing social norms, including capitalism, consumerism, and materialism.
“Centered in bohemian havens like San Francisco and the East Village of New York City, Beats embraced Eastern religions, experimented with drugs and a looser form of sexuality; their followers became known by the diminutive term ‘beatniks.’
“As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the Beats and beatniks gradually gave way to a new kind of counterculture: the hippies, who preferred to call themselves ‘freaks’ or ‘love children.’ The hippies were much younger than the Beatniks (they could have been the Beats’ children) and had a much different style.”
Houston-born Gilbert Shelton, who was 20 years old in 1960, was right on the cusp between the two countercultural movements. He published his first two Wonder Wart-Hog stories in Bacchanal, a short-lived University of Texas humor magazine, in the spring of 1962.
More tales of the Hog of Steel followed in Texas Ranger, Charlatan, Harvey Kurtzman’s Help!, and Drag Cartoons magazine. By the latter half of the 1960s, WW had his own magazine and was featured in a mass-market paperback, Wonder Wart-Hog, Captain Crud & Other Super Stuff.
Wonder Wart-Hog is “…a costumed antihero and one of the first ‘underground’ cult figures,” noted David Pringle in his book Imaginary People. “(T)he grotesquely ugly Hog of Steel … armed with the powers of flight and super-strength … struggle to save America from communists and other subversives.”
The themes in the zany feature are emblematic of the 1960s zeitgeist: the counterculture, psychiatry, and civil rights. Shelton’s humor could, however, occasionally spill over into remarkably ugly excess.
“His style was much less confessional than (Robert) Crumb’s, and more slapstick,” observed Roger Sabin in his book Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. “His characters were often goofy, but with pretensions which landed them in ever more disastrous situations. Contrary to many critical assessments of Shelton’s work, he also possessed the same underlying critical intelligence and would sometimes attack individual politicians directly.”
The super-piglet who would be Wonder Wart-Hog was sent to Earth by his parents on the planet Squootpeep, who mistakenly believed their world was going to blow up. The infant porker was raised in America by hillbillies, not out of affection, but because his invulnerability prevented his being butchered and cooked.
“Wonder Wart-Hog is an 8-foot-tall, 800-pound humanoid warthog,” wrote John Freeman. “In his everyday life, he is mild-mannered and slightly built reporter Philbert Desanex whom the Hog of Steel becomes by squeezing himself into a 5 foot 7 inch Philbert suit, or at least that seems to be the case most of the time. At others, they are two separate entities with Wonder Wart-Hog from time to time commenting on Desanex’s life from his stomach.
“Whatever the case may be, when the need is called for, Wonder Wart-Hog either bursts out of Philbert, blowing him to bits (he puts the bits back together later) or crawls out of Philbert’s mouth, ‘Wow I feel great, It’s like I’ve lost 800 pounds!’
“The Hog of Steel then applies his universal solution to all of life’s problems… extreme violence.”
“The humor of Wonder Wart-Hog works on many levels,” Wikipedia notes. “Fundamentally, it is slapstick comedy in which excessive force is a constant theme. But it also parodies the McCarthyism and violence of the far right. Wonder Wart-Hog is a pro-establishment, law-and-order type personality, who often goes overboard. For example, he’s willing to kill a lady driver talking on her cell phone because she might cause an accident.”
“From Supersnipe to The Tick, superhero parodies have been around just about as long as there have been superheroes,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “But few have achieved the longevity, or appeared in such a variety of venues, as Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog.”
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