Number 1608: Herman goes to the birds; Wood’s Munsters story

 A tip of the Pap-cap to Ken Landgraf, who supplied the raw scans for this 1965 story from Gold Key’s The Munsters #8. Wallace Wood and his assistants did the artwork. According to an e-mail from Landgraf:

I spoke to [Dan] Adkins before he died...He and [Richard] Bassford penciled the job. Most likely they used faces from other Munster comics... Wood inked all the main figures, the assistants mostly filled in black areas and worked on inking the backgrounds ... KEN

Thanks, Ken. That provides an interesting insight into the Wallace Wood studio of the era. “Strictly For the Birds” isn’t a great story, and just pops up in the midst of a series mostly written, penciled and inked by artist Fred Fredericks. But anything done by Wood has its place on any Golden Age fan’s comic radar.

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Number 1468: Curse of the Sea Witch

I’m a week late for another Halloween-style story, but I really don’t need that excuse to show Wallace Wood artwork.

“Curse of the Sea Witch” is from Dark Mysteries #1 (1951). Art identifier extraordinaire Jim Vadeboncouer, Jr says that Joe Orlando and Wood collaborated on the cover, and qualifies his opinion on who did the art on the story by listing it as by “Wood and ?” I agree with Jim, and I think other hands worked on the story with Wood, but he did a substantial amount of it, enough to give it that “Wood-veneer.” The story for “Sea Witch” is credited to Arthur Framson. Checking Jerry Bails’ Who’s Who I see that Framson is credited with only a couple of comics in the same period, so it could have been a pen-name, or he just had a really brief career in comic books.

Wood’s artwork shouts at us with his creative use of display lettering. I like his horror effects,* blood-dripping letters and such. He also designed the logo on the cover, which was used though issue #10, before it was re-designed.

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*More Wood lettering effects. Just click the picture.

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Number 1442: Shanghai Chicken

The Grand Comics Database credits Wallace Wood with penciling and inking the lead story from Fox’s Inside Crime #3 (1950). Even before I read the story I saw that Wood had done the splash page, the inside front cover, pencils, inks and lettering, but his familiar style only pops up occasionally in the nine pages to follow. Fox was notorious for either slow or non-payment, and my guess is it was a story done quickly, probably by at least one other artist than Wood, and maybe even more. Wood worked with several other artists during his career. At one time his main collaborator was Harry Harrison, although I’d have to depend on someone else to tell me if Harrison worked on this story.

Johnny Devine, the “Shanghai Chicken” was a real person, an Irish immigrant who became a crimper, a man who provided men for ships’ crews by the practice of shanghaiing (kidnap). The story, set in the 1860s, has anachronisms, and very little or no research was done for the drawings. So far I haven’t been able to track down the origin of a nickname like “Chicken”, which in context of the times doesn’t mean a coward as it does today. When I googled “Shanghai Chicken” I came up with some tasty recipes for a Chinese dish.

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Number 1432: Savage World!

The story, “Savage World!”, although drawn by Al Williamson years earlier, was rewritten by Wallace Wood and used in the first issue of Wood’s prozine, Witzend, in 1966. Apparently readers were confused about the genesis of the story, about Al Williamson’s friends (like Roy Krenkel, Angelo Torres, Frank Frazetta), who would chip in to help on a job. Wood included this paragraph in Witzend #2:

The “long since defunct” comic book Wood refers to is Buster Crabbe.

I couldn’t find my copy of Witzend #1 (someday I’ve just got to get organized) so I scanned it from its appearance in Marvel’s black and white magazine, Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 in 1974.

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Number 1400: Wally Wood cracks the flying saucer mystery

I haven’t seen the book, Wally Wood Strange Worlds of Science Fiction, but I understand it reprints this 1952 Avon one-shot, Flying Saucers. It's a tale that I’ve seen reprinted elsewhere, also. You may have seen it. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to Wood, even if I’ve seen it before, I want to look at it again.

The story takes me back to the early fifties and speculation about the phenomenon of UFOs, then called flying saucers. The stories took flight (ho-ho) in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a salesman who piloted his own small airplane, spotted flying objects over the Cascade Mountains in Washington. The truth of what people are seeing has been up in the air (ho-ho-ho) ever since. It’s one of those fascinating enigmas that human beings lock onto, and has been the stuff of speculation and fiction ever since. The Avon comic reminds me of some of the things I read when I was a kid, and anxious to know what all the hubbub was about. There were many books and articles, and many of them gave their version of the “truth” about flying saucers. A few of the many “truths” I read:

The craft were piloted by beings from another world for the purposes of invasion, stealing our water or natural resources, protecting us from ourselves and our nuclear weaponry, or they were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Or flying saucers were not interplanetary: they were developed by the Nazis during World War II, or by the Russians, or secret weapons developed by our own country...

You could just about pick any theory and if it fit into your mindset you could claim it was the real secret of the flying saucers. All of the conflicting theories had their effect on me and the result was I quit reading them. If a UFO lands in the park close to my house and something alien steps out I'll believe. Until then I’ll just let fun stories like this entertain me without straining my brain.

The cover is credited to Gene Fawcette.

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More incredible early Wood. Just click the pictures.

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