Wally Wood

[rtroxel]

Wood has always been one of my favorite sci-fi illustrators. He was a great comic book artist in general, and one of the original cartoonists for Mad.

If his work is unfamiliar to you, here are some sites:

http://splashpages.com/wood/woodlist/woodlist1.html#

http://www.psychosaurus.com/frames/wwgallery.html

[Quest]

Oh wow. Wally Wood is one of my favorites, too. I have the reprints of his Weird Science work (wish I had the originals). He was a fantastic artist. He continued to work into the 1970's. Sad about his unfortunate death.
He did some Marvel stuff in the 70's that was pretty good. And I think some revived All Star Comics issues as well.

[rtroxel]

I'm now reading Against the Grain: Mad Artist Wallace Wood.

It's essentially a collection of art that hasn't been available for years, including many pieces from Galaxy Magazine. There are also many essays and interviews with friends and associates of Wood.

If you're unfamiliar with Wood - and that's hard to imagine - this is as good a place to begin as any. Wood's extraordinary attention to detail, his control of light and shadow and the boldness of his visual concepts - space ships, robots, aliens and planetary landscapes - all combine to make him one the greatest science-fiction illustrators who ever lived.

But there is more: His zany parodies of other cartoonists' styles made him one of Mad's most memorable artists. The other-worldly females that appear in almost everything he drew, in various states of dress and undress, add to the dark, erotic and mysterious universe that was Wally Wood's.

He also had some great writers as collaborators, including William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, during his E.C. years. These were the teams that produced the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, which produced unsparing views of warfare's destruction and its victims. Such representations of war were rare in 1950s comic books. (Wood had served in World War II as a paratrooper and much of this experience went into his drawings.)

Okay. End of tribute. What I'm saying is that Wood's work really "puts you there", whether it's a distant planet or the beaches of Normandy. (Either that, or you're laughing your head off. )

[mazikos44]

I have been a fan of the great Wally Wood for many years,the amount of detail in his work,his pure raw talent,put simply the man was a genuis.
Wood worked in many fields,not just comics,but it was his work in that field that led me to begin a life long love affair with comic book art and the work of the late,great Wally Wood.
EC LIVES!!