Plop #23 (September-October 1976) featured a very special comic for Fantasy fans. This was “The King of the Ring” by Wally Wood. By 1976, The Lord of the Rings was a well-established bestseller. For ten years it had been a favorite of hippies and college students as well as rock musicians. A text so well-read was a natural for a parody and Wood was not the first. The Harvard Lampoon published the much racier Bored of the Rings in 1969. Written by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney, the book is a dirty, nasty rendering of Tolkien. It is also very funny.
So Wally Wood had a lot to live up to. Being a DC comic he couldn’t use nudity or rude jokes. Such freedoms he was quite used to in his own publishing in Witzend where he built the series known as “The World of the Wizard King”. In his own Tolkienesque world, Wood had naked fairy women and heroes with libidos. It was a simple matter of taming this down for his visual look of “The King of the Ring”.
Wood’s Snyder, the Incognito King of the World, is similar to another send-up he did in 1969 called “Dragonella” that featured a foolish knight who resembles Prince Valiant. A pair of sunglasses and we have Snyder. Not being able to do dirty jokes, Wood uses other Fantasy memes like the Seven Dwarves, drawing them in a very Disney fashion. (Here he mixes a bit of The Hobbit, since the thirteen dwarves are from that book.) In the best tradition of Wood’s Ugly Stickers, bubble gum that came with parody commercials on them, (I still have mine on an old lunch box), the humor is schoolyard level with the dwarves being Slappy, Droopy, Sleazy, Groucho, Harpo, Snoopy and Shlepo.
Wood hits all the important scenes and characters with over-affectionate Glum, a big nasty Nork, Nazi Ghouls, and the giant spider Schlob. Froydo kills the Nork, not with a dagger but with a gun. This is 1976 and Wizards, by Ralph Bakshi has not yet hit theaters. Wood has predicted the final encounter with Avatar and Blackwolf. Wood finishes with the iconic finale in Mount Doom, keeping it somewhat accurate, except the volcano doesn’t melt the ring but spits it back out. Gandalf grabs it and decides to become the next dark lord.
The whole comic is irreverent but well drawn, sometimes obvious and at other times clever. The level of parody is fun without being insulting. I only wish it could have been longer. I miss the Balrog. And some good elf jokes. This would not be the last of the LOTR parodies but it certainly is one of the best.
