Oh, Wicked Wanda! started life in Penthouse magazine as a text story written by established author Frederic Mullally in September 1969. The story was initially accompanied by a single Brian Forbes illustration, but Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione—like Hugh Hefner—always had a penchant for comics, and it wasn’t long before the stories mutated into a strip feature, this time illustrated by British comic legend Ron Embleton. Embleton was a highly respected comic artist famous for his Wulf the Briton newspaper strip and work on The Trigan Empire in Look & Learn. He painstakingly created a different painting for each page of the Wanda strip and was an excellent caricaturist.
The team worked well together, and recounted the story of 19-year-old Wanda Von Kreesus—the beautiful brunette heiress to a multimillion-dollar fortune and a “man-hating” lesbian. She lived in an old castle on Lake Zurich, Switzerland, and ran a bank that contained secrets that could destroy all the world’s governments. Candyfloss, Wanda’s love interest, was a 16-year-old blonde nymphet who was originally sent as a “present” to Wanda’s father. Wanda had her father chase Candyfloss around the castle, and when he died of exhaustion Wanda claimed her inheritance.
Their ludicrously sexy and farcical adventures took them across the globe to Arabia, Tibet, India, and Disneyland, and even included time travel. Interestingly for the period, the central protagonists—Wanda and Candyfloss—were extremely liberated and strong, and didn’t require men for anything, except to occasionally abuse.
Frederic Mullally believed that men usually admired women who are smart enough to know what they want and strong enough to get it, and reflected this in his writing. Throughout her adventures, Wanda was assisted by numerous aides, including her elite army of “butch-dikes” (the Puss International Force); mad, masochistic ex-Nazi scientist Homer Sapiens; and the Neanderthal-like “chief jailer” and master torturer J. Hoover Grud (a thinly veiled reference to FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover)
Oh, Wicked Wanda! was crammed with in-jokes and references to popular culture and current affairs. Many politicians were caricatured in the strip, including a drenched Ted Kennedy wearing a ’76 Presidential campaign ribbon and holding a steering wheel. The whole “joke” referred to Kennedy driving off the Chappaquiddick Bridge and killing his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne.
Embleton’s cover to the Oh, Wicked Wanda! collection in 1975.
Wanda’s first visual renderings were by Brian Forbes, in stylized illustrations accompanying Frederic Mullally’s text stories.
An Oh, Wicked Wanda! strip from Penthouse, July 1979, shows Embleton’s skills at portraying female anatomy.
The constant appearance of the Senator in the strip soon wore thin, but other politicos satirized included Richard Nixon, Charles de Gaulle, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, and Mao Tse-tung. Cultural icons such as Bob Hope, John Wayne, W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel and Hardy, Muhammad Ali, Salvador Dalí, and Lee Marvin were also lambasted.
Wanda also took swipes at other comic strip characters, including MAD’s Alfred E. Neuman, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. An early running gag was the constant, friendly digs at the strip Little Annie Fanny (published in Penthouse’s main competitor, Playboy).
Penthouse published a compilation of the first 24 episodes in 1975, and a paperback of Mullally’s Wanda text stories was also released. Boosted by the strip’s popularity, Embleton and Mullally pitched the idea of a Wicked Wanda movie, but Penthouse refused to acknowledge the creators’ copyright, and Hollywood’s producers felt the content would have been too controversial for cinema at the time. However, like George Petty and Alberto Vargas, Embleton’s Wicked Wanda art transcended the page and briefly graced the nose of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress as part of an exhibition at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida in 1975.
Toward the end of the series, Oh, Wicked Wanda! became less of a humorous cheesecake comic and more of a political rant, and this may have been a contributing factor to its cancellation at the end of 1980. Ron Embleton moved onto Oh, Wicked Wanda!’s replacement strip Sweet Chastity in 1981, written by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. The strip ran until 1988, when Embleton died of a heart attack, aged 57.
While Penthouse’s current owners have the plates, the exact location of most of Embleton’s original Wanda paintings is unknown. There’s speculation that Bob Guccione kept many, but may have sold these at Sotheby’s in 2002. Occasionally, originals appear on eBay selling for $1,500–$3,500.
Wanda as she usually appears in the strip—as nature intended.
Famous figures constantly guest starred in Oh, Wicked Wanda! Here, Marlon Brando appears, as does Walt Kelly’s newspaper strip cartoon, Pogo, in the final panel.
Writer Frederic Mullally and artist Ron Embleton guest star in their own comic strip. Note how Embleton depicts himself disparagingly. There’s also a guest appearance from Sophia Loren.
