Peter Hsu's First Appearance

Peter Hsu was one of Wallace Wood's last assistants. He is credited on Wood's ODKIN-SON OF ODKIN and, judging by the overall lack of Woody-ness in that book, may well have done more of it than Wood himself, by that point quite ill and near his 1981 suicide.

Hsu went on to be somewhat successful in comics with his own publication QUADRANT and various spinoffs, adapting a basic Wally Wood style into a wash photo-realism that, while it never seemed less than stilted to me, was quite successful for some years. Of course, a reason for that may have been that he also took the inherent sexuality of Woody's work and thrust it blatently at the reader, first in a teasing way that made it look as though all of his women were lightboxed from porn mags and later much more explicitly.

All that said, there's no denying that Peter Hsu had talent right from the beginning. Here we have his first appearance in a professional mgazine- from an early VAMPIRELLA about ten years before his work on THE WIZARD KING. You can just imagine the young artist devouring all of the classic Wood pieces that appeared in VAMPIRELLA at that time.

Found one piece on the 'Net that talked about how Hsu just disappeared after awhile. Hmmm...just because one leaves the comics field hardly means he disappears. Here's Peter Hsu today: http://www.film.bc.ca/agent/production/peter/hsu.htm