The character first appeared in issue 1029 Wizard (24 July 1943) in a story titled "The Truth About Wilson". The first adventure introduced Wilson as a supreme athlete, who joins a race from out of the crowd and manages to record a three-minute mile. The character's adventures were written by Gilbert Lawford Dalton using the pen name W S K Webb, and a book, The Truth About Wilson collected a number of the text stories in the 1960s. Thought by Paul Gravett to be the prototype of the "astonishing sporting prodigies" who became popular in British comics, (cf. Alf Tupper, Roy of the Rovers), Gravett describes him as an "unassuming totally dedicated loner, [wanting] no glory or publicity". Although his stories were initially told in prose, a move to the comic papers The Hornet and Hotspur saw t