Wonder Wart-Hog (the "Hog of Steel") is an underground comic book character, a porcine parody of Superman, created by Gilbert Shelton and first published in 1962. Over the years, Shelton has worked on the strip in collaboration with various writers and artists, including fellow UT Austin alums Tony Bell, Bill Killeen, and Joe E. Brown Jr.
The humor of Wonder Wart-Hog works on many levels. 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, often gone overboard. For example, he's willing to kill a lady driver talking on her cell phone because she might cause an accident.
Wonder Wart-Hog's rogues gallery includes "Super-Fool, Super-Hypnotist, the Masked Meanie, Super-Patriot, the Plastic Man, the Granny of Gruntville, the Bad Brainbender, Pie Man, the International Order of Bomb-Flinging Fiends, the Amazing Meanie Fuel, the Famous Rushin' Bear, Evil Weevil, the Mafia, the Zymotic Zookeeper, Smiling Sergeant Death, the Elusive Chimerical Chameleon, and the Pigs from Uranus, among others".
The zany showdowns involve contests such as backward motorcycle races (who can go the slowest) or exposing some villain running a fraud scheme such as comet insurance. Wonder Wart-Hog dispatches his enemies in various ways, such as grinding them into sausage, flinging them into orbit, or crushing them with his immense bulk. But on one occasion he punished a lynch mob by giving them Cadillacs and TV sets, and then banishing them to Mississippi.
Gilbert's humor occasionally crosses the line into violence of a sexual nature, but the emphasis is more on the absurdity of the situation than the act itself.
Fictional character biography
Wonder Wart-Hog is the son of the rulers of the planet Squootpeep, sent to Earth by rocket when Squootpeep's scientists predict the planet will soon explode (in fact it does not). The infant porker is raised in America by hillbillies, not out of affection, but because his invulnerability prevents his being killed and cooked.
His secret identity is the mild-mannered reporter Philbert DeSanex, who works for the Muthalode Morning Mungpie. Instead of being a human disguised as a rubber-masked monster, Wonder Wart-Hog is a pig-faced monster who disguises himself as a rubber-faced human. Occasionally, however, Shelton has depicted Wonder Wart-Hog and DeSanex as two distinct individuals, with Wonder Wart-Hog residing inside the reporter's body.
Wonder Wart-Hog's one-time love interest is Lois Lamebrain — an analog of Lois Lane — whom he rapes and kills without mercy.
Origin and publication history
The idea for Wonder Wart-Hog came to Gilbert Shelton in 1961, while he was living in New York. The following year, Shelton moved back to Texas to enroll in graduate school and get student deferment from the draft. The first two Wonder Wart-Hog stories appeared in Bacchanal, a short-lived college humor magazine produced by former staffers at UT's humor magazine The Texas Ranger, in the winter/spring of 1962. Shelton then became editor of The Texas Ranger (where he had first published work in 1959)<ref>[http://ut-texas-ranger-magazine.posterous.com/texas-ranger-magazine-february-1959 Texas Ranger] (February 1959).</ref> and published more Wonder Wart-Hog stories. The character attracted the attention of Mademoiselle, which wrote about Wonder Wart-Hog in the August 1962 "College" issue. Harvey Kurtzman's Help! also published a few of the Hog of Steel's adventures in 1964–1965.
Drag Cartoons
Pete Millar's DRAG Cartoons magazine published a Wonder Wart-Hog strip in the early 1960s. The first ongoing publication of Wonder Wart-Hog was in DRAG Cartoons issues #25-49 (1966–1968); several of those also featured another Shelton strip called Bull O'Fuzz. Issue #45 boasted several strips by Shelton, including a parody of West Side Story called "Vice Squad Story".
Many of these strips were reprinted in 1968, when Millar Publishing Company released two issues of a quarterly Wonder Wart-Hog Magazine. 140,000 copies of each were printed, but distributors did not pick up the magazine and only 40,000 of each were sold.