THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF
WALLACE
WOOD VOLUME 1
Edited by Bhob Stewart & J. Michael Catron
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS Seattle
Contents Introduction | 7 Howard Chaykin
Introduction | 11 Maria Reidelbach
Wood Paneling | 13 John Workman
Against the Grain | 19 Bhob Stewart
From Here to Nudity | 61 Bhob Stewart
Wood’s First Comics Job | 67 Bhob Stewart
Avon Calling | 79
Waking Up From the American Dream | 179 Thommy Burns
Mad Man | 189 Steven Thompson
Good Humor Man | 197 Ronn Sutton
Quote ’n’ Unquote | 205 Colonel Art Moger
Chocolate-Covered Wood | 207 Bhob Stewart
Wood Bounces | 211 J.D. King
Roger Hill
Still Crazy Cards After All These Years | 221
A Thousand Rays in Your Belly | 93
Rick Keene
Bill Mason
Into the Woods | 117 Larry Stark
The Best Damn Artist in the Business | 131 Al Williamson
Our Gypsy Camp | 225 Diane Dillon
West 74th Street | 227 Russ Jones
When in Doubt, Black It Out | 233 Ralph Reese
Geronimo! | 137 John Severin
Old Ink, New Ink | 245 Larry Hama
When Better Drawrings Are Drawrn | 147
The Man Without Peer | 247
Grant Geissman
Mark Evanier
Traveling Through the Galaxys | 155
A Leprechaun, A Giant | 256
Roger Hill with Larry Niven
William Gaines
Wood Bounces J.D. King
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he urban centers of mid-20th century America had a magic and poetry only certain artists could capture. Smokey Robinson set it to music. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote crystallized this zeitgeist in words. Weegee preserved it with photographs. Wallace Wood put it on paper with his cartoons. I think of him whenever I step out the front door on one of those days when the air is so clear and the sun so strong that the light almost blinds. Every object has its own distinct, sharp drop shadow, and the world looks like a Wood cartoon. That’s the kind of artist he was — he sticks with you beyond the perimeters of the comic book panel borders. He gets in your blood. Wood is usually appreciated for his science fiction, fantasy, and heroic comics. Although much of this is first rate, especially “The Curse” (Vampirella #9, January 1971), I prefer his humor work. Not as much attention is paid to this, outside of his Mad work. That’s unfortunate because those strips are only a fraction of his humor output, and in the comic book Mad, he was working on top of Harvey Kurtzman’s breakdowns. He added his personal vision to the Kurtzman layouts and threw in plenty of sight gags to create a brilliant end product, but it couldn’t be completely considered his own show. Kurtzman’s layouts gave him a solid framework to draw over, arguably the best comics have ever seen. It also must have eased his workload, allowing him to go into greater depth and detail than his less-inspired Panic work from the same period. Together Kurtzman and Wood turned out some of the world’s most magnificent humor comics: “G.I. Schmoe,” “Black and Blue Hawks,” “Teddy and the Pirates,” “Superduperman!”, “Flesh Garden,” “Wild 1/2,” and more. These stories hit a zenith in both comics writing and art.
In the following decades, they have been copied and paid homage to and have influenced scads of cartoonists, but have yet to be topped. A little later, after Kurtzman’s departure with Mad #28, Wood began creating cartoon masterpieces for the magazine on his own. With the exception of six topnotch pages for Trump #1 (January 1957) and a single page and small self-portrait for Humbug #1 (August 1957), Wood never contributed to another Kurtzman project. The trouble with four-color newsprint comics is that the color, even if expertly done, often obliterates the artist’s pen and brush work. The black-and-white Mad magazine package gave Wood’s art a chance to really shine. That black-and-white format, along with a larger size and a more adult audience, allowed him to utilize gray-shading methods, such as wash and Craftint. His work became more sophisticated. Wood’s output for Mad was phenomenal. With the exception of #22 (the all-Elder issue), he contributed to every Mad from #1 to #86, plus #90 and, finally, #143. A highlight of this era is the two-page spread in “Blackboard Jumble,” a satire on the MGM movie Blackboard Jungle (1955), adapted from the Evan Hunter novel. This Mad #25 (September 1955) piece is a tour de force, a panoramic blockbuster jam-packed with teens of the black leather jacket persuasion and vastly outnumbered teachers (including Glenn Ford) battling it out in the school classrooms, spilling out into the streets and up onto the elevated train. In addition to the switchblades and pistols, Wood tossed in a grenade, broken bottle weapons, a hanging victim, Alfred E. Neuman, flying teeth, a hurtling baseball, a Wood baby and wagon, a crap game, a holdup, a OPPOSITE: Wood drew this men’s magazine cartoon in 1957, then gave the scene a science fiction twist for the cover of Warren’s Spacemen Yearbook in 1965 (p. 230). (See p. 163 for yet another version.) Gent, August 1957.
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truck hijacking, various fists, a stomped-on record collection, someone falling out a window, someone hanging out a window, someone being tied to the elevated tracks, someone smoking a cigar, and someone reading a racing form. All this (and more) in two pages. In 1955, you got your money’s worth when you dropped two bits for a copy of Mad. “What’s All This Jazz about Jazz?” in Mad #31 (February 1957) interviews radio’s Al “Jazzbo” Collins in his Purple Grotto. Wood used his flawless Craftint technique to great effect in one full-page illustration and 18 smaller drawings. The crazed lateral thinking contrasts “square” Mad editors with the bebop environs of the horn-rimmed Jazzbo, garbed in wigged-out, crazy cool outfits that change from panel to panel. When the once-square editors emerge from Jazzbo’s underground kingdom, they’ve been transformed into hipsters and float off into the night. Wood used his jazz-inspired style on at least two other Mad pieces, both in wash. In “The Hidden Persuaders Become the Hip Persuaders” (Mad #46, April 1959), real gone drawings of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and other TOP: A panoramic blockbuster. “Blackboard Jumble.” Mad #25, AugustSeptember 1955. ©EC. RIGHT: “Mad Reveals Insurmountable Problem Discovered While Testing Civilians for Flight.” Mad #51, December 1959. ©EC.
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groovy cats endorse Madison Avenue products with beat lingo. In January 1960, Mad #52 continued on the same kick with a far-out “The Night Before Christmas,” written in hip talk. Kids and parents live in a Frank Lloyd Wright–type pad that’s gone googie, decorated with biomorphic furniture and art in a Calder-Picasso mode. Everyone’s cool, man, and into jazz. Santa, who falls by in a sleigh that looks like the spawn of a jet bomber and a ’59 DeSoto, is sporting shades, and ditto for the reindeer who are topped off with kooky lids — zebra, leopard, and plaid-patterned berets. For “Brubbie Desbeck
cartoon characters go through their routines, singing songs set to familiar melodies (a typical device of scripter Frank Jacobs). In The Wallace Wood Treasury (Greg Theakston, Pure Imagination, 1980), Wood assistant Ralph Reese, an outstanding cartoonist in his own right, mentioned Wood’s opinion of “The Mad Comic Opera” while commenting on the Mad Woodwork: “If you don’t care, you’re just hacking it out. Wally used to say, ‘If you can’t do it good, do a lot of it.’ I guess he is saying that even if the drawing isn’t on the mark, it should still be interesting to look at. That’s one of the reasons his Mad work was so good. He really got off in packing each panel with gags. He could take an average parody and make it a really funny piece. Wally likes adding his own visual gags — weird creatures, ugly children, and so on. I think his Mad work is his best stuff. He thought ‘The Mad Comic Opera’ was one of his all-time best jobs.” No cartoon aficionado would disagree. The drawing is of a caliber that just isn’t done these days. For Topps Chewing Gum, Inc. between 1961 and 1971, Wood turned out bubble-gum cards, posters, and stickers, the most infamous being Ugly Stickers (1964-1965). These were card-size stickers with a peel-off backing. Pictured on
Goes to Mars” in Dude (September 1957), the Wood bop style supplied an imaginative use of black-and-white wailing on some hip graphics. What’s especially odd about these works is that while Wood laid down a definitive bop approach to visuals, his own musical taste ran in the direction of folk and country and western. The Wood wash drawings for “Mad Reveals Insurmountable Problem Discovered While Testing Civilians for Flight” (Mad #51, December 1959) are like perfect jewels. The “insurmountable problem” is that civilian Lester Cowznofski refuses to come out of the controlled testing environment since it’s the ideal escape from modern civilization (crime, the Bomb, taxes, TV commercials, traffic jams, overcrowding, monstrous relatives). Wood took the commonplace normality of late 1950s America, distilled it into caricature — and then caricatured the caricature. The drawings are cartoony and exaggerated, but Wood’s lighting, perspective, detail, smooth wash tones, and overall depth also make it ultra-realistic. Subtle Craftint shading replicates Hollywood lighting effects in Wood’s “The Mad Comic Opera” (Mad #56, July 1960), a lampoon of the Li’ l Abner stage musical with a cast of funny paper favorites. The cartoon characters have a dramatic, three-dimensional look, even “flat” ones such as Dagwood, Henry, Mickey Finn, Rex Morgan, Dick Tracy, and Little Orphan Annie. Virtually every panel is brimming over with well-orchestrated detail on top of detail as the
TOP LEFT: “Personality of the Month: Elvis Pretzel.” Trump #1, January 1957. ©HMH. ABOVE: “Walt Dizzy Presents Dizzyland.” Mad #30, December 1956. ©EC.
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each sticker was a painting of a grotesque monster bearing a commonplace name: Alan, Art, Charlie, Henry, Margaret, Marie. Some of these creatures were Wood’s, and some erupted from the twisted pencil of Basil Wolverton. More Wood monsters appeared on Insult Postcards (1967), while Crazy Cards (1961–1962) spoofed Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Painter and jazz musician Larry Rivers, who once said, “An artist is moved by himself and his anxiety about what he should do,” was quoted in the late 1960s comparing Topps’ Flying Things, illustrated by Wood, with pop art. Wood humor appeared in several non-comics magazines, such as his full-page sexy gag cartoons for Dude, Gent, Nugget, and Playboy, his racy Mad-style stories for Cavalcade, and his 1968 TV Guide illustration. He also had an artistically rewarding, if brief, fling with Madison Avenue, illustrating advertisements for Alka-Seltzer, Chemstrand, Dr Pepper, Scandinavian Airlines, Portage Porto-Ped Shoes, and other products. Why didn’t he do more advertising? “The main reason he quit was because of the people involved,” said Reese in 1980. “The advertising field has more than its share of creeps. He could do a lot of work there if he wanted to. I don’t blame him.” Cartoonistic Woodwork surfaced during the late 1960s in such commercial comic books as Archie’s Madhouse and Gold Key’s The Munsters, along with Wood inking on DC’s Anthro and Angel and the Ape. Other DC Woodwork appeared in Plop! and The Amazing World of DC Comics. In 1969, Wood produced Heroes, Inc., a comic book for the U.S. armed forces featuring the five-page “Dragonella,” illustrated by Wood and co-written with Ron Whyte. A cute, satirical look at the psychology of male/female relationships, it’s akin to “Pipsqueak Papers” from witzend, and includes the character L. Sprague De Freeb, who was introduced in witzend ’s oneshot “The Rejects.” Witzend debuted in the summer of 1966, prior to the advent of the underground comics movement. The magazine was Wood’s attempt to pull the comic book up by its cultural bootstraps with material aimed at adults. Witzend was nicely produced, with good paper and sophisticated design, combining EC alumni and other established comics artists with proto-underground cartoonists. The witzend reader was exposed to early work by Roger Brand and Art Spiegelman, along with Reed Crandall, Steve Ditko, Will Elder, Frank Frazetta, Gray Morrow, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Williamson, and, especially, Wood himself. Witzend’s artists were able to work free from the usual mainstream restrictions of the Comics Code, genre storylines, and house art styles. OPPOSITE: Original art for Wood’s portrait of Stan Freberg [and Daws Butler (Yogi Bear) in frame at right] for Freberg’s movie magazine satire, “Anyone for Wrist Slashing?”. In 1955 and 1956, Freberg wrote for Mad even as his satirical records sold millions. Note instructions on how to use Craftint to add gray tone patterns to the artwork. Mad #25, August-September 1955. ©EC.
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With a variety of content and visual approaches, witzend expanded on the accepted boundaries of comics. Ditko commented that he enjoyed the artistic freedom of witzend under Wood’s editorship. It was the way a viewpoint was presented that concerned Wood, not whether a contribution was harmonious with his own outlook. Pre-underground artists who could not get their feet in the doors of the industry’s dominant comics firms found the door was wide open at witzend. “Pipsqueak Papers” (witzend #3, 1967), drawn in Wood’s lush, wonderful cartoon style, staged a psychological war of the sexes in a fairy-tale forest. Pipsqueak, a Wood baby, is the determined protagonist, an innocent in a corrupt and cynical world. The object of his affections is Nudine, a fickle nymph. In the first episode, Nudine remains unimpressed with the baby Pipsqueak’s physique, so he commandeers a humanoid body in order to please her. By the next installment (witzend #4, 1968), our hero gets wise to Nudine, wearies of her, and saves his own skin by sacrificing her to the monstrous arch-villain, The Collector. The other major Wood humor feature for witzend, “The Rejects” (witzend #4), was based on satirical cartoon superheroes originally submitted to Paramount in 1967 as a proposed Saturday morning TV series. Fearing the theft of his characters after Paramount shut down their animation department, Wood directed assistant Bhob Stewart to script a story utilizing all nine members of the Rejects team (Glomb; I.Q.; Wee Wit; Hairy James; Kenneth Banghead; Dimentius; the Blue Banana; Venus; and Miniman, the microscopic mutant) in order to copyright the characters. Following Stewart’s breakdown roughs, Wood cartooned “The Rejects” with an inking assist from Dom Sileo. The end result is bright and funny, suggesting an ideal Saturday morning program of heroics, science fiction, and satire. Outside of these three features and two covers (witzend #2, #3), humorous Woodwork did not reappear in witzend until #10 (1976), with its Plop!-like cover and Sally Forth reprint. “Warmonger of Mars” (Creepy #87, March 1977), was written by Wood and illustrated by Ralph Reese (with uncredited Bernie Wrightson penciling, at least in the splash panel). This Mad-style parody of the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter novels was, according to Reese, originally drawn circa 1972 for Pow!, the adult magazine Wood was packaging for Warren. Plans fell through, and submissions wound up in various Warren publications. In typical wiseass Wood fashion, the story culminates in a confrontation of ERB-type heroes (Junk Carter) vs. a smorgasbord of tongue-in-cheek villains. Involved in the action are Flashy Gorgon, Mung the Merciless, Rick Radford, Gail Garden and Mr. Barkoff, Bucky Rutgers and Hilma, Conman the Conqueror, the nerdy S.F. Ryter (complete with thick glasses, pencil behind ear, and pants hiked to chest level), and the Pulp Men of Planet Stories. This potentially epic battle is interrupted by the landing of an
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Earth space mission astronaut who remains unfazed by the fantastic assortment of science fiction and comics heroes and villains. Instead, he busily collects rock samples. “Warmonger of Mars” is Wood’s comment on the scientific reality of the Space Age imposing on and dispersing the mirage of the science fiction–fantasy world. Wood and the other early Madmen were unwittingly laying the groundwork for the late 1960s underground comics movement. Some kids who grew up with Mad and other EC titles wanted to become cartoonists, and having tasted the heady freedom offered in the pre-Code ECs, these talents couldn’t consider a career in the restrictive world of the commercial comics industry. In the late 1950s and early 1960s they printed their primitive cartooning efforts in self-published satire magazines of limited circulation. Executed in open emulation of Mad, these zines (Foo, Smudge, Wild, Squire) featured work by some of the same slaphappy joes who would, a decade later, make their mark with the undergrounds — Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson, Art Spiegelman, and others. To Crumb, Wood was “one of the great masters we all studied for his dazzling technique. I still study and marvel at his work — him, Davis, Elder, and, of course, Kurtzman.” Crumb’s mid-1980s switch to a brush (in Raw and Weirdo) has given his work a look highly evocative of early 1950s EC art. Paul Krassner’s The Realist (1958–1974, 1985–2001), an irreverent journal of many opinions, was the acknowledged TOP: “The Mad ‘Comic’ Opera.” Script by Frank Jacobs. Mad #56, July 1960. ©EC. RIGHT: Tissue rough to “New Movie Monsters from Madison Avenue.” Script by E. Nelson Bridwell. Mad #53, March 1960. ©EC.
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precursor of the 1960s underground press. For the May 1967 issue (#74) — some nine months before Zap Comix #1 — Wood created his “Disneyland Memorial Orgy” with many Disney characters engaged in just about every imaginable form of debauchery, perversion, and vice. Rendered perfectly in the
Disney style, it went much further than “Walt Dizzy Presents Dizzyland,” Wood’s previous Disney send-up in Mad #30 (December 1956). The “Disneyland Memorial Orgy” helped set the tone for the underground comix just around the corner. The Realist, witzend, and Warren Publishing all paved the way for underground cartoonists by showing how the Comics Code and/or mass-market tastes could be circumvented. Apart from influencing the underground satire and humor artists and publishing underground art in witzend, Wood’s presence can be detected in the work of some adventure-oriented underground artists. Richard Corben’s later comics tend to be overblown and pointless, but some of his early work, especially the poignant and ironic “Cidopey” in Up From the Deep #1 (May 1971), was excellent and displayed an imaginative use of lighting, cinematic angles, and good storytelling that owes a solid debt to Wood. Similar Woodesque cinematic panels and lighting effects can be found in the strips of Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez (1940–2012). Crumb referred to Spain as “a true, devoted disciple of Wood.” In the late 1960s, Spain used to visit Wood at his studio on West 74th Street. Spain would bring some beer, and they’d sit around and shoot the breeze. Wood even invited him to assist on strips for the U.S. Army, but Spain’s radical left politics kept him from accepting the offer. Other underground artists have been less individualistic and more slavish in their homage to Wood. A prime example is Rand Holmes (1942–2002), who seems to have based his entire approach to drawing on copying various Wood formulas, resulting in stories that have sometimes been, if not stilted, then at least less than original. There are noteworthy exceptions however. One of these is his outstanding cover for Last Gasp’s Slow Death #5 ([April] 1973), a funny, good-natured parody of Wood’s cover for Weird Science #9 (September-October 1951). The composition is solid, the Woodisms work, and the coloring is dazzling. Holmes isn’t alone. Many cartoonists in both the underground and the mainstream industry have copied Wood to the extent that he has become one of the most imitated
artists ever. He’s turned out many assistants and influenced scores of other artists, some of them excellent, but none have been able to reach Wood’s plateau. His work goes further, his panels have more depth, and his line has more bounce to the ounce. Part of his secret was his complete mastery of perspective, lighting, composition, storytelling devices, and graphic techniques. But that’s only part of it. The rest of the mystery is a certain personal charm and magic that was uniquely Wood. After being held in such high esteem by underground artists, and having published some of them in witzend, along with his iconoclastic nature and lifestyle, it was probably inevitable that Woodwork would be printed in the underground. He followed his Realist poster with a contribution to the Winter 1968 issue of Jay Lynch’s Chicago Mirror (#2), an underground magazine of text, poetry, and cartoons that was a direct ancestor of the classic underground comics series, Bijou. Some of the artists to appear in the Mirror over the course of its three-issue run were Lynch, Crumb, Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton, and Skip Williamson. The Wood entry was only a spot illustration originally planned for the second issue of the fanzine Cavil, edited by Phil Roberts. TOP LEFT: One of the many humor series that Wood did for Topps was Ugly Stickers (1964–1965). Each sticker bore a painting of a grotesque monster with a commonplace name. Kids could use them to insult friends and rivals. TOP RIGHT: Wood was 31 when he received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for “Best Comic Book Artist of 1957.” Mad ran this photo of the event. (He won again in 1959 and 1965.) Mad #41, October 1958. ©EC.
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1
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But Cavil #2 was never published, so Roberts passed the drawing on to Lynch. Graphic Fantasy #2, a 16-page 1971 Utah underground with a minuscule press run, sported a Wallace Wood poster insert. This wasn’t a new work, however, but a full-color reprint of his cover for EC’s Incredible Science Fiction #33 (January-February 1956). In the mid-1970s, Wood finally sliced to the core of the underground in Big Apple Comix (September 1975), which featured the best-known and most substantial Wood underground pages. Big Apple was published and edited by “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg, the gal Friday at Marvel Comics 1 This Wood cartoon ran in Dude, a men’s magazine. Dude, July 1957. 2 Dude, September 1957. 3 This Wood cartoon ran in Nugget, a men’s magazine. Nugget, October 1958. 4 Wood’s ad for Portage Porto-Ped Shoes appeared in Esquire magazine in 1968. 5 Wood’s 1972 ad for Dr Pepper. 6 A psychological war of the sexes in a fairy-tale forest. Page 1, panel 4, “Pipsqeak Papers.” witzend #3, 1967. ©WWE.
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during its 1963–1968 glory years. Seeking a change, she left Marvel in 1968 and three years later decided to check out San Francisco, where many of her former New York City friends (Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman, Michele Brand, Kim Deitch) were living. Although she was impressed with the then-thriving Bay Area underground comics community, Flo was a New Yorker at heart, and after her return East the following year, she began planning an underground with a New York City theme. She solicited contributions from her artist friends, including Wood, whom she had known since their Marvel days when he had been drawing Daredevil. Wood inked two pages of Herb Trimpe pencils and also joined the team of cover collaborators, but his major Big Apple contribution was the three-page “My Word,” a wild and raunchy social comment. With a format borrowed from his EC classic, “My World” (Weird Science #22, NovemberDecember 1953), “My Word” delves into the underbelly of
life in New York, the plight of Western civilization, and the human psyche. Flo Steinberg remembers Wood as “a real good egg” who was “very supportive” during the worried and anxious times of the Big Apple project. Wood stories, including “My Word” and “Dragonella,” have been reprinted in the French comics magazine L’echo des Savanes, while several “My Word” panels were re-worked for a 1981 semisequel, the five-page “The Sexual Revolution” (Gangbang! #2, 1981), which Wood prefaced as “either a statement of policy or an erotic fantasy.” We live in an imperfect world where too often justice is not served, a world where vacuous pop artists and their New Wave descendants swipe “comic book imagery” and are rewarded with gallery space and museum exhibitions, as well as media and critical attention. Needless to say, these artistic charlatans also rake in Big Bucks. Meanwhile, true artists are often ignored. Some die broke and broken. It has only been in recent years that the passing of a notable figure from the comics world rates an obit on TV or radio, or in The New York Times, or in whichever newsweeklies still survive. Wallace Wood was one of a comparative few in the field who pushed his art to an extreme. One can’t help but hope that, if there isn’t a hell for the fakes of the Art World
to roast in, there is at least a Wallace Wood heaven — an alien landscape populated with dinosaurs, gorgeous dames, cute creatures, and a platoon of Wood babies to keep him company for eternity.
TOP LEFT: Wood’s first cover for EC. Weird Science #9, September-October 1951. ©WMG. TOP RIGHT: Rand Holmes’s first cover for Slow Death. Slow Death #5 [April] 1973.
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