Basil Wolverton
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Basil Wolverton (July 9, 1909 – December 31, 1978) was an American cartoonist and comic book writer-artist who contributed to many serialized publications during his career, including Marvel Comics and MAD Magazine. His unique style was humorously grotesque and disgusting to the extreme where many editors supposedly felt physically ill after seeing his pictures. He labeled himself on his stationery in the 1950s as a "Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People Who Prowl This Perplexing Planet" ([link]).
Biography
Born in Central Point, Oregon and later movied to Vancouver, Washington, Wolverton in his early adulthood was a vaudeville performer and a cartoonist and reporter for the Portland News. He sold his first work to a national publication at the age of 16 and began pitching comic strips to newspaper syndicates that year. His comic strip, Marco of Mars, was accepted by the Independent Syndicate of New York in 1929. However, Marco was never distributed because Buck Rogers, which debuted that same year, was deemed too similar. It was 13 years later before he would sell his first comic features to the new media of comic books. Disk-Eyes the Detective and Spacehawks were published in 1938 in Circus comics. In 1940, Spacehawk (a different and improved feature) made its debut in Target comics, running for 30 episodes (262 pages) until 1942.In the 1940s, Wolverton produced the comedic feature Powerhouse Pepper, which appeared in various comic books published by Timely Comics, the 1940s precursor of Marvel Comics from 1942 through 1952 (76 episodes, 539 pages). Comics fans and historians consider that series a high watermark of humorous comics, with its alternately alliterative and rhyming dialogue. In the tradition of Bill Holman's Smokey Stover, Wolverton placed throwaway gags into background signs, a device that later became a trademark of cartoonist Will Elder at Mad. Wolverton penned many other features to produce a total of some 1,300 comic book pages.
Wolverton was baptised into Herbert W. Armstrong's Radio Church of God in 1941, was ordained as an elder in 1943. A member of the board of that church, he was one of the six people, including Armstrong and his wife, who re-incorporated the church in 1946 when it moved its original headquarters from Oregon to California.
Wolverton received his most widespread publicity that same year, when he won a contest to illustrate "Lena the Hyena", a horrific character invented by Al Capp for his Li'l Abner newspaper strip as a running gag. Supposedly too ugly to appear in a newspaper, she remained unseen beneath an editorial note stating that her face had been covered to protect readers. In response to popular demand that she be shown, Capp launched a contest for artists to submit their interpretations. Out of an announced half-million entries, Wolverton's was the winner; it appeared in the strip and was featured in Life magazine. The contest was judged by Boris Karloff, Frank Sinatra and Salvador Dali. It won Wolverton fame and notoriety and moved his career into the mainstream spotlight with features and caricatures appearing in Life and Pageant. The portrait employed his unique "spaghetti-and-meatball" style, which he used in almost every illustration from then on.
At his peak in the 1950s, he produced what many regard as his best work -- 17 episodes of comic book horror and science fiction for Marvel and other comic book publishers, including one story by future best-selling novelist Daniel Keyes. Wolverton made several contributions to Mad in the 1950s through the 1970s.
During that decade, he also illustrated Biblical subject matter, creating apocalyptic artwork for Armstrong's written work. In 1956, Armstrong had Wolverton illustrate the booklet 1975 in Prophecy, and later, The Book of Revelation Unveiled at Last, offered free on Armstrong's radio show, The World Tomorrow. In 1958, Wolverton began writing and illustrating The Bible Story, also titled The Story of Man, originally serialized in Armstrong's Plain Truth magazine and later published in six volumes, covering the entire history of the Old Testament.
In 1968, Wolverton did a series of posters for the Topps Company, displaying the twisted headshots that brought him fame, and in 1973 returned to mainstream comics, illustrating several covers for Joe Orlando's satiric Plop! at DC Comics. His career was cut short, however, by a stroke in 1974. He died in Vancouver, Washington, four years later.
Legacy
Many of Wolverton's humor features were collected in the book Wolvertoons (Fantagraphics, 1990), edited by Dick Voll with graphic design by Bhob Stewart. The book received an endorsement on a television documentary about horror/fantasy writer-director Clive Barker. In one sequence, Barker. running through a Los Angeles bookstore, stopped to pull a copy of Wolvertoons off the shelf. Holding it up to the camera, he said "Grotesqueries!" and then continued running through the store.Wolverton's son, editorial cartoonist Monte Wolverton, draws in a style almost indistinguishable from his father's, and like his father, he has also worked for The Plain Truth and contributed to Mad.
References
- [California "Articles of Incorporation" (1946) for the Radio Church of God]
- [Career overview, with illustrations]
- [Reproduction of original 1956 British edition of 1975 in Prophecy]
- [Wolverton's "Armageddon" drawings from 1975 in Prophecy]
- [The Weekly Wolvertoon] (Monte Wolverton official site)
Books
- The Bible Story (1982)
- Wolvertoons: The Art of Basil Wolverton (1990) (ISBN 1560970227)
- Basil Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper (2001) (ISBN 1560971487)
| Contributors to Mad "The Usual Gang of Idiots" |
| Editors |
|---|
| Jerry DeFuccio | Al Feldstein | John Ficarra | Harvey Kurtzman | Nick Meglin |
| Writers |
| Anthony Barbieri | Dick DeBartolo | Desmond Devlin | Stan Hart | Frank Jacobs | Tom Koch | Arnie Kogen | Barry Leibmann | Jay Lynch | Andrew J. Schwartzberg | Larry Siegel | Lou Silverstone | Mike Snider |
| Writer-Artists |
| Sergio Aragonés | Dave Berg | John Caldwell | Don Edwing | Al Jaffee | Don Martin | Paul Peter Porges | Antonio Prohías |
| Artists |
| Tom Bunk | Bob Clarke | Paul Coker, Jr. | Jack Davis | Mort Drucker | Will Elder | Drew Friedman | Bernard Krigstein | Peter Kuper | Hermann Mejia | Norman Mingo | Tom Richmond | Jack Rickard | John Severin | Angelo Torres | Rick Tulka | Sam Viviano | Basil Wolverton | Monte Wolverton | Wally Wood | George Woodbridge | Bill Wray |
| Photographers |
| Irving Schild |
| Related articles |
| Mad Magazine | William M. Gaines |
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