The Wizard
67 years ago - William Asmodeus Zard is born.
48 years ago - 19-year-old Zard becomes a gunman for the mob.
45 years ago - 22-year-old Zard is caught and imprisoned by Danette Reilly, brother of another gangster Rodney Rilley, starting his lifetime belief that superheroes are all secretly self-serving opportunists.
43 years ago - 24-year-old Zard is released from prison. He jumps parole and ships out to the far east, looking to learn about hypnotism and illusions.
38 years ago - 29-year-old Zard returns to America, presenting himself as mentalist and stage magician the Wizard. He starts building his own secret criminal empire.
37 years ago - 30-year-old Zard confronts the All-Star Squadron, accusing them of secretly being criminal themselves. When they stop him he flees to Europe.
36 years ago - 32-year-old Zard tries to steal a powerful magical artifact, but is stopped by Zatara.
33 years ago - 34-year-old Zard is brought into the Injustice Society by Vandal Savage in an effort to defeat the All-Star Squadron.
28 years ago - 39-year-old Zard builds a criminal extortion racked driven by projections of himself while he remains in hiding. He is tracked down by Laurel Drake and again imprisoned, although Laurel is severely hurt and chooses to retire.
22 years ago - 45-year-old Zard regains access to his magic while in prison and creates an illusory duplicate there as he begins hunting the globe for the fabled Sorcerer's Treasure.
15 years ago - 45-year-old Zard finds the Sorcerer's Treasure, accessing vast new magical power. He builds a new team, the Injustice Gang, to go after the Justice League and frame them for their own crimes before their plans are exposed. . They are defeated, and he is unable to control his own power and is imolated.
I came into comics primarily in the mid 90s to 2000s, and so a lot of my early understanding of the history of DC started out from that perspective. Because of this, I spent a long time thinking of huge swaths of comic history as being generally silly and not really fitting into the comic book world as I now understood it.
It was only after many years of collecting and reading classic comics from other decades that I started to understand that my limited perspective was doing a huge disservice to the creations of these classic creators and the stories they told. Yes, they were often certainly silly, but what I was missing was that was a huge part of their appeal. These were children's stories told on an absolutely limitless canvass, and to go back and read these classic stories and characters the way they were intended was way more fun then just writing them off as not cool enough to hang with the 90s comics of my childhood.
The Wizard was one character that was often written off as being a silly relic of the past, but if you actually go back and READ those comics he is an absolutely fantastic villain, and if we didn't work to include him our version of DC would just be that much poorer for it. I hope you guys like the way we've built him into our timeline
It was only after many years of collecting and reading classic comics from other decades that I started to understand that my limited perspective was doing a huge disservice to the creations of these classic creators and the stories they told. Yes, they were often certainly silly, but what I was missing was that was a huge part of their appeal. These were children's stories told on an absolutely limitless canvass, and to go back and read these classic stories and characters the way they were intended was way more fun then just writing them off as not cool enough to hang with the 90s comics of my childhood.
The Wizard was one character that was often written off as being a silly relic of the past, but if you actually go back and READ those comics he is an absolutely fantastic villain, and if we didn't work to include him our version of DC would just be that much poorer for it. I hope you guys like the way we've built him into our timeline
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The Wizard's Comic HistoryThe Wizard is a character that absolutely proves unequivically just what is so great about the Golden Age of comics. He first appeared in All-Star Comics #34 in 1947, several years after the introduction of the Justice Society, with the team now firmly established as the gold standard of the industry. In it the Wizard appears, accusing them of being frauds and criminals. To his mind, no person is actually capable of being good, and so the members of the Society must in fact be playing some secret angle to hide their crimes. The issue features several stories as each member of the Society comes up against the Wizard before they all find themselves together, no longer in their headquarters as they thought but now fully under his control. We discover that all the strange events we'd been witnessing were in fact the results of hypnosis and illusion, but that his illusions are so effective they can actually kill their victims.
#34 is an absolutely gorgeous issue with art by Irwin Hasen, but what really stands out here is just what a fantastic villain the Wizard is. The explanation of his powers is actually refreshingly functional for a Gardner Fox creation, but more than that he also has a really great motivation that gives him his own special spin on the world; he is so deeply cynical about humanity he simply cannot imagine a world where anyone is anything other than a criminal. |
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The first gathering of the Injustice Society was only a few issues later, and the Wizard was a core member of that group from the very beginning. His inclusion there would go on to drive the bulk of his appearances, long into the Silver Age; whenever the Injustice Society of Earth-2 made an appearance, you could count on him being there. In the late seventies He made an in-cannon transition over to Earth-1 as one the baddies to actually star in their own series, the Secret Society of Super-Villains. He started out looking like a much older version of the classic Wizard, but as the book went on to give many of these Silver Age heroes new costumes and designs, he eventually got one of his own. His new costume was more like something out of a fantasy story, and in the later issues he actually would lead his own version of the Secret Society.
After the Crisis of Infinite Earths, he made another major appearance over in Infinity Inc, where the series was finding it's footing after the changes to the timeline. Here a classic version of the original Wizard returns as a major enemy to the team, assembling an all new group call Injustice Unlimited including the children of seveal classic Injustice Society members. This Wizard, with his giant top hat, really looks fantastic... and just happened to be drawn by a young Todd McFarlane. The Wizard would continue to appear occasionally though the 2000s in references to the classic Justice Society, but his weird pre-crisis costume redesign would pop up one more time in a Geof Johns-penned storyarc of JLA tied into the upcoming Infinite Crisis. |
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Our Wizard StoryWe were really temped to take the classic Wizard and use him as a Justice Society villain; he's just a great pedigree of a Golden Age baddie and his debut story really is one of the best examples of what that era could do. Ultimately, though, he just proved to be too useful a concept as a way to connect certian story threads in the modern timeline together.
His comic origins are simple but actually prettty effective, so we essentially just reproduced them here, with the addition of suggesting that his initial capture as a mob gunman, which set him on his path of deep cynicism, was at the hands of Firebrand. That worked so well we also tied him into the stories of Zatara and Cladina Drake. He's going to be a core part of the Injustice Society, which in our timeline goes up against the All-Star Squadron, so we also had his solo story happen with that team as well. The real utility of the character, however, is in allowing us to bridge between the Injustice Society and Injustice Gang. It never really made a whole lot of sense that Lex would invent that name; it just works better if it's something that came before, and now with this Legacy villain building his own Gang to confront the early League, it makes so much more sense for Luthor to build his own Gang later. Also, we just get a fantastic, classic comic villain out of it. |