Brant Parker, 86; cartoonist co-created ‘The Wizard of Id’

Cartoonist Brant Parker, who co-created the comic strip “The Wizard of Id” and rendered its medieval kingdom for more than three decades, has died. He was 86.

Parker died Sunday at a Lynchburg, Va., nursing home of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease and a stroke suffered last year, announced Creators Syndicate, the strip’s distributor.

His death came eight days after longtime “Wizard” collaborator Johnny Hart died of a stroke at 76.

The Kingdom of Id sprang to life in a New York hotel room when Parker and Hart papered the walls with two dozen “Wizard” panels. After touring the impromptu gallery, a syndicate executive bought the strip.

Launched in 1964, “Wizard” appears in more than 1,000 newspapers worldwide.

Hart was already drawing the Stone Age strip “B.C.” when he sought out Parker to help wring humor from the Middle Ages. They had met in 1950 when Parker, an artist for the Binghamton Press newspaper in upstate New York, judged a high school art contest that Hart had entered.

While Parker drew the “Wizard” pictures, Hart came up with the gags that they refined together.

“It’s two different kinds of thinking, always,” Parker told The Times in 1986. “The trick is to find two people who are basically alike.... We both enjoy the same kind of humor so it’s been a great relationship.”

It endured until 1997, when Parker turned the “Wizard” drawing over to his son, Jeff, who had served a decade-long apprenticeship. “The Wizard of Id,” which ran in The Times from 1968 to 1998, will continue as a collaboration between the Parker and Hart families, according to Creators Syndicate.

Set in a castle, “Wizard” follows the oppressed people of a run-down kingdom dominated by a small tyrant known as “the King.”

“The original premise was built around the Wizard goofing up and everything backfiring on him. Everything kind of grew out of that,” Parker said in 1986.

One of Parker’s favorite “Wizard” characters was one he thought up -- Spook, the prisoner in the dungeon who is always trying to escape.

“I think it’s because of the pathos in Spook’s situation. He’s stuck in there for life, and he keeps trying to get out,” Parker recalled. “I love pathos humor.”

Brant Julian Parker was born Aug. 26, 1920, in Los Angeles. After attending the Otis Art Institute from 1939 to 1942, he served in the Navy during World War II.

His “main school of cartoon learning” was a two-year stint at Walt Disney Studios in the late 1940s “that was fun,” Parker later recalled. He worked on several Donald Duck shorts and the 30-minute “Mickey and the Beanstalk” (1947).

By the late 1940s, Parker and his wife, the former Mary Louise Sweet, had moved to New York. She survives him as do his five children, a brother, 13 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Parker lived part of the year in Irvine but moved to Centreville, Va., in the 1990s.

He collaborated with other cartoonists, producing “Crock” and “Goosemeyer,” but stayed with “The Wizard of Id.” The strip has been packaged in more than 20 books.

“Humor is a ... very important part of our survival and existence now,” Parker said in 1986. “There’s nothing that eases tension like a good laugh. It can just about solve all the problems if it were used right.”

valerie.nelson@latimes.com