4 out of 5

A jam comic of sorts featuring the superpowered titular “Superwizard,” flying around and dispatching of grotesque pulp villain Johnny Crimes – who uses the sliced-off face of Gerald Ford to imitate the president – and, in a second story, saves the planet from sci-fi villain “The Super-Fiend of the Lost Planet.” Inbetween, we get some old school vengeance in a 2-pager about the skeleton-faced Fantomah.

While the riffage here is similar to other zine-y takes on Golden- / Silver-Age hereoes such as All-Time Comics – Mettling’s ink-heavy Fantomah especially – Campbell and Alves push to more surrealist extremes, perhaps both times owing to Alves, whether due to his wild perspectives as artist on the Johnny Crimes tale – bodily proportions blown out to Image extremes; ridiculous POV changeups – or in the wayward, between-panel plotting method by which he scripts in the Super-Fiend tale. As such, this would be quite a random find in a bin, perfectly encapsulating the spirit of such dollar-dipping adventures, in which you discover an outre gem on an imprint which published once and disappeared. However, it’s not necessarily that “innocent”: Campbell’s writing, with the lead story taking up the majority of the pages, dominates the tone, and has a bit more self-awareness, lightly poking at politics / social dynamics. While Fantomah and Alves’ goofier contribution are good balances to that, it makes it hard to judge the single issue – Stardust may as well be two different characters in the two stories – and either expanding one of the stories or giving us another issue or two would draw a clearer circle around the book’s intentions.

Not that unclear intentions can’t make for a very entertaining read!