A week after the death of Johnny Hart — who wrote and drew B.C. and wrote The Wizard of Id — we have word of the death of Brant Parker, who drew the latter. Parker was 86 and had been ailing for several years. He stopped drawing The Wizard of Id completely in 1997 but the strip had featured much work by assistants — mainly his son Jeff — for years before that. Jeff is expected to carry it on. Brant was also involved for a time with the newspaper strips, Crock, Goosemeyer and Out of Bounds.
I'm afraid I know very little about Mr. Parker beyond what you can get from obits like this one. But everything I said about Johnny Hart being funny applied to The Wizard of Id, a strip that was very popular in this country and wildly so in Australia. I used to have a friend down there who'd send me the reprint books that they put out in that country — huge, wonderful volumes that caused you to laugh out loud every page or two. I wish we had collections like that of the strip here.