One of the several books of visual arts I am reading is AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST Wallace Wood edited, compiled, and contributed by Bhob Stewart.
Wallace Wood was one of the four original MAD comic book artists, along with Jack Davis, Will Elder, and John Severin.
Wally Wood (1927-1982), through the years, worked as artist and illustrator in many publications. He drew excellent realistic looking space vehicles with all the gadgets, tubes, wires, dials, and what all, which you felt you were looking at a real machine. He contributed to many many comic books. If you read comic books chances are you saw at his art work and was amused how real the figures looked in front of you and how heavy the lines were.
In MAD, to me, he seemed to specialize in making his sexy women with pointed knees – or that is just how I perceived it.
I already knew he was a diabetic and was losing his eye sight when he took his own life. I didn’t know what a dedicated artist to his own work and his friends he was – and the details of things.
It is a very good book written by someone who knew Wallace Wood. Bhob Stewart worked for him.
I remember seeing Bhob’s name in letter to the editors of the EC comic publications it seems ever since the beginning of EC comics. I think he has been in the background of comic book publishing ever since when he was knee high to, well, a knee.
Bhob has a neat blog site. It is named Potrzebie which is a word MAD played around with for years. Bhob’s site has a lot of recycled material from the book he edited about Wallace Wood, but also has other visual pleasing things.
I don't remember if I mentioned this or not, but back in the day when I had to earn my keep as a babysitter, I was at someone's house and found a huge book that was all reprinted EC comics. I was hooked! Then they actually started selling the comics again when the HBO Tales from the Crypt series was on TV, and I was in heaven. That was some entertaining stuff.
ReplyDeleteSuzanne,
ReplyDeleteI have all the EC comics, that was reprinted in hardbounds - which include MAD, PANIC, Tales from the Crypt, Frontline Combat, a few science fiction titles, another war title, and a few more horror titles.
They are great. I keep re-reading them picking up on details I think I overlooked the first time. The War comics were anti-war comics - they were all new at this - William Gaines, the publisher, had just inherited the EC comics from his late father and took over the company to resell it but found it interesting... up to then EC stood for Educational Comics... they did things like Classic Comics, Bible Stories Comics... so they changed the name to Entertainment Comics.
In the long haul, only MAD survived.