Ben Varkentine just e-mailed me about a review he posted of the new book, Against the Grain: Mad Artist Wallace Wood. This reminded me that I'd forgotten to finish a series of recommendations of new books about great comic artists. This is just such a book. In all my days of being around comic fans and readers, I've heard almost every conceivable or even inconceivable opinion but I can't recall anyone ever not loving the work of the late Wally Wood. He was one of those guys who could do it all: Horror, s-f, war, fantasy, funny. I think his work for MAD is shamelessly underrated and when I bought some originals in one of those MAD auctions, I could see one reason why. MAD's printing in those days (before about three years ago) was pretty poor.
The art was so good that it still glistened on the newsprint, but you were only getting maybe 50% of what a guy like Wood put onto his pages. Being humor, the work is easy for some to dismiss but I honestly prefer it to all that Wood did, for example, in the EC science-fiction stories. His work in the fifties was good but cluttered. His work in the seventies was good but often a bit too simple, in part due to failing health and assistants of varying ability. (An exception would be when he did something like his "World of the Wizard King" series, where you could see he really had his heart in the work.)
As is no secret, Wood was a troubled individual. The first time I met him, we sat and talked at the 1970 New York Comic Convention and we were interrupted by a stream of autograph-seekers, most of whom wanted old EC books signed. Wood would lift up the cover just enough to expose the bottom of page one, where he'd scribble "Wallace Wood" for the person. He did not open the cover all the way. He didn't want to look at the story, lest it remind him of certain bad times. This meant that he signed the first story, even if the first story was by someone else. After the second or third time he signed an Al Williamson story this way, he explained to me that when he did look at his old work, he was simultaneously struck by two things. One was that there were certain things he could do then that he felt he could no longer do; that some parts of his drawing ability had deteriorated over the years. The other was an annoyance at how much needless work he'd put into most of those stories. He said, and this is an approximate quote, "All of these jobs were better an hour or two before I finished. I got them right and then I kept adding crap and detail and more crap." Elsewhere, Wood was sometimes quoted as telling people that he put so much into some stories hewing to a philosophy of, "If you can't draw well, draw a lot."
He also told me that day (and repeated one of the other times we spoke) that though EC then paid higher rates than he got anywhere else, he could have made a better living working for a lower-paying publisher. At EC, he said, they paid you 10% more and expected you to spend three times as long on a page…and he sometimes did. Oddly enough, when I asked Al Williamson about this, he said it did not apply to him. Apart from the occasional quickie rush job (like some westerns he and Angelo Torres knocked out over a weekend for Charlton), Williamson did the best job he could on every assignment, regardless of rate. In both cases, they were working for EC and putting so much into their art more for pride of craft than money, but Wood obviously was more conflicted by that choice, taking the darker viewpoint.
This new book, edited by his longtime associate Bhob Stewart, is an anthology of essays and remembrances, mostly by folks who knew Wood and worked with him. It is not at all a criticism of the book to say that it is far from exhaustive. Many parts of his career, such as his work for Marvel and most of his MAD period, do not get much attention…but Wood is too big a subject to be served by one book, or even two or three like this. What you do get though is a penetrating and revealing look at an important artist, and if you have the slightest interest in the man, this volume belongs on your shelf.
Though not really an art book, it contains some wonderful illustrations. TwoMorrows Publishing is rather conservative about what it prints, so a number of Wood's racier drawings did not make it in. One interesting omission can be seen on the web. A recurring practical joke among comic artists is to try and sneak something naughty by their editors, just to see what they'll do. The way it's usually done is to draw the scene correctly then to do a pasteover with the randy version, so that it can be peeled off later. In one EC story, Wood stuck a completely out-of-context nude woman into a scene. After he got his laugh, he removed the pasteover and the clothed version was underneath, which was what was published. Stewart has restored the pasteover and posted it here.
Also in that section if you browse around, you can find a reproduction of Wood's infamous Disneyland Orgy drawing which ran in The Realist in 1967 and which became a much-bootlegged poster. At the time I first saw it, I thought it was funny but your sensibilities change. Now, my thoughts are, first of all, that it's pissing on the creative works of others for a cheap laugh. Secondly, I think about how it's another example (of way too many in comics) of something making a ton of money for someone other than the actual creator of the work. And thirdly, I think there's a certain act of self-destruction to it…a guy who was struggling to make a living deciding to do something that would close him off from a lot of lucrative commercial accounts. Even though he didn't sign it, Art Directors who dabbled in licensed characters all knew who'd done it. You can't help but wonder how Wood's life might have turned out if he'd ever been paid near what he was worth. He even managed to quit MAD (or by some accounts, get himself tossed out) just before its remaining artists were beginning to be offered movie poster jobs and Time magazine covers. While Jack Davis and Mort Drucker were getting thousands for a painting, Wood was inking Superboy.
Anyway, enough of this. Buy the book, which you can do at the TwoMorrows site. They also have a nice Wallace Wood Checklist you'll want. And you can read Ben Varkentine's review here.
