Wrath of the Gods by Willie Patterson

Michael Moorcock has mistakenly been attributed with writing the comic “Wrath of the Gods”, but Moorcock’s job at Boys’ World was to write text features not comics. Willie Patterson was the man behind the strip, having had success with the SF strip “Jeff Hawke” at Daily Express. Patterson would write comics for ten years before a debilitating disease would force him to leave.

Boys’ World was a comics weekly, running from January 1963 to October 1964, when it was combined with Eagle. In Boys’ World, Willie Patterson wrote this two-pager, first drawn by Ron Embleton then John M. Burns. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) described the strips thusly:

The stories recounted the adventures of an impetuous young man, Arion, and his various encounters with the minor gods and magical figures of the ancient Greek myths. Compared with the usual standard of comics writing at the time they were well paced and inventive, but are more memorable for the groundbreaking artwork.

In “Things That Grip: Greek Mythology Began For Me” Phil Ruston reports:

In spite of his aptitude for Science Fiction Patterson had an omnivorous mind that devoured Latin and Greek literature with as much enthusiasm as he studied Astronomy or Physics. As a result his scripts for ‘Wrath of the Gods’ captured the authentic ‘feel’ of Greek Mythology, even as he played fast and loose with the archeological facts. Thus, the whole series is structured as a classic quest in which each week’s episode opens with a fresh wonder that the hero Arion has to overcome before he is sent on the next leg of his journey with a new instruction from the gods. And while Embleton later confessed to being unhappy with the historical inconsistencies that he had to negotiate, his ability to bring a sense of realism to the most fantastic scenes proved a perfect counterpoint to Patterson’s soaring imagination.

Now my Sword & Sorcery flags are being raised here. First off, Arion was a name used for the DC character, Arion, Lord of Atlantis. The comic was created by Paul Kupperberg and Jan Duursema, beginning as a back-up feature in The Warlord #55 then running for 35 issues, November 1982 to September 1985. In 1992 Arion was resurrected as Arion the Immortal for a six-part mini-series. Did “Wrath of the Gods” inspire the comic in any way? Doubtful, since most of these UK weekly comics didn’t find their way over to the US until Judge Dredd made a splash. Kupperberg ran the fanzines The Comic Reader and Etcetera in the early 1970s so he may have known of Patterson’s strip. Since Kupperberg’s Arion is a powerful sorcerer there really isn’t much similarity except the name.

More important is the idea of ” a classic quest in which each week’s episode opens with a fresh wonder“. That is an apt description of another DC comic, Arak, Son of Thunder (fifty issues between September 1981- November 1985) created by Roy Thomas and Ernie Colon. Maligned by many as “Conan the Indian”, it remains one of my favorites for the very reason Ruston describes above. I enjoyed seeing how Roy was going to tie in history and monsters every month. Did Roy know about “Wrath of the Gods”? Possibly. He is a very erudite scholar of comics and publisher of Alter Ego but I doubt this as well. Roy loves superheroes, not Sword & Sorcery. (Please let me know if I am wrong, Roy.)

The plot of “Wrath of the Gods” is Arion makes a deal with Zeus in his temple after Arion’s family is killed. Zeus will return the dead to life if Arion can retrieve the Great Bow of Delos. Arion departs the temple on his quest for the item, meeting strange people and creatures including Time, Charon, a titan, the minotaur, centaurs, giant snakes, Circe, Atlas, Medusa, and Cerberus. And that’s just the first story arc. Arion and Zeus make other pacts and more fantastic adventures follow.

Again to recall Arak, Son of Thunder, he too would faces off against centaurs, harpies, and Charon but since Roy had Arak go from North America to Asia (the long way) he included all European folklore, Asian, Indian, Egyptian, Viking and First Nations monsters. Roy Thomas had all of the major mythologies and history to play with, and it worked for me. It was like he took “Wrath of the Gods” and opened it up to the entire world, not just Greece. Sadly, the series went unappreciated and ended after 50 issues and a few specials.

The other link we need to consider here is Ray Harryhausen. He animated the beasties for 1958’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts. It isn’t hard to imagine Willie Patterson was aware of these. (If he wasn’t, the publishers certainly were.) According to Phil Ruston, Patterson played fast-and-loose with the archaeology. This Roy Thomas did too, trying to shoehorn different eras together to make them work in Arak’s Dark Ages. Ray Harryhausen never let history or myth dictate things when a good story or a fantastic battle could be produced. (I am thinking of the cyclops/centaur hybrid in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973).

For any fan of both fantasy and history, as Robert E. Howard, the creator of Sword & Sorcery was, there is a special kind of frisson that comes from a good historical adventure that features interesting and challenging monsters. Some of my favorites include the Bard stories of Keith Taylor, the Simon Magus stories of Richard L. Tierney, the Cormac Mac Art novels of Andrew J. Offutt, and of course, Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane and Turlough O’Brien. In comics there are excellent series like Cullen Bunn’s Helheim, mythological comics like Beowulf Dragonslayer, Hercules, the Legendary Journeys and The Adventures of the Man-God, Hercules. “Wrath of the Gods” deserves to be listed with these, an early leader in this small, but favored sub-genre of Swords & Sorcery.