The Erotic Art Of Wallace Wood!

Wally Wood was one of the great artists in the history of the comic book form, and one of the most troubled. He was a mercurial figure, starting out on the sci-fi and horror comics of his day in the 50's and elevating to the best of them at EC Comics before broadening out to humor and superheroes and more. He was always it seemed a maverick of sorts, spending a few months at Marvel revising Daredevil, stopping at Tower to develop the THUNDER Agents, beginning Doctor Doom's series, visiting DC to spruce up the Justice Society of America, and all the while working at the edges of the establishment in the Undergrounds with work that the Big Two would never publish, most of it with a distinctive slant on explicit sex.

Much of Wally Wood's notorious sexy stuff was collected some years ago in a French collection titled "Con de Fee" and that title was lifted by Fantagraphics for their relatively modern collection of Wood's "dirty comics".

His racy cartoons kick off the collection, lifted from magazine here and there and science fictional and other wise. 

One of the most famous pieces in the tome is Wood's Malice in Wonderland which takes Dodgson's little darling and retools her, so to speak for National Screw. There are pages dedicated to the Wizard of Ooz also. 

Some oddities I'd never seen before are some sexy fable revisions from a men's magazine called Cavalcade.

Dragonella is included, a very Woodesque fairy tale. 

For Marvel he kicked off their Pussycat series, also in one of the copious men's magazines that were quite common once upon a time. 

Of a more purely satirical form is the infamous Disneyland orgy scene from The Realist Magazine. It's one of the gems in this book and I'm very happy to at long last have it in a hard copy format after admiring it for years online. 

Wood's somewhat gritty pages "My Word" from the ground level  Apple Comix #1 are included as well. 

Wood did some really attractive if naughty covers for Screw Magazine and there are several more than seen here. Some I'd never seen before.

Gang Bang is a flat-out soft-porn comic and features some of Wood's more outrageous takes on popular comic strip characters from across the decades. His voluptuous if dizzy Sally Forth is on hand as well. 

There's lots of other things here such as "The Brave Nude World" originally done for Someday Comics and lots of wacky sexy sci-fi images like the one above which require no comment.  This isn't a collection for those who think comics are for children only. These are not those comics, these are comics for adults, admittedly in some cases adults with a singular focus. Wood's style (which truth told diminishes mightily as the years roll by in this collection) is so spare and clean and sleek that when he uses it for naughty purposes it still resonates with a shimmer less polished porn fails to achieve at all.

I'll let Wally Wood himself (or guys on his staff at least)  handle my usual closing.

Blazing Combat Two!

Blazing Combat has always been considered a critical success and with the talent involved it's hard to see how it couldn't be. These are legendary artists assembled to put together both grand and small tales of war and service and bravery and other things too. Archie Goodwin gives us a broad spectrum of man at war with stories ranging from the American Revolution to the then current struggle in Vietnam. And it's that latter story in the second issue set in the land that America chose to stand up to worldwide Communism that the trouble for Blazing Combat really began. 

"Landscape" with art by Joe Orlando tales the story of war from the perspective of a villager caught between the armies that seek to slay one another in the name of their respective ideologies. And from where that old farmer sits the destruction that comes from the infiltration of the Vietcong or the flames of the American troops that come to seek them out is not really any different. It's this story which maybe suggests that American troops might've burned out a native village that put the American Legion and the U.S. Military on notice that Blazing Combat was not a magazine that was reliably tooting the patriotic trumpet.

On the opposite end of things is the second story featuring lush art by Reed Crandall which takes us to the American Revolution and shows how soldiers were unhappy with the classic style of war fought in Europe and instead embraced a new more aggressive approach led by the most surprising of war heroes.

"MIG Alley" tells us the story of fighter pilots trying to keep their nerve as they face down their Korean counterparts in an air war that is faster and more deadly than any to that point. One man is supremely confident and he is justified in that confidence until he's not. It's a dandy tale by Goodwin and Al McWilliams on the art chores.

Joe Orlando is up again drawing a Goodwin story about the Spanish-American War and the raw nature of combat and how fighting it "Face to Face" can change the way one sees the enterprise. The glamour of war fades when fear and death are looked square in the eye.

Al Williamson and Angelo Torres draw a handsome tale about brutal tank warfare which puts the reader in the seat of a tank which runs into the Panzers of Rommel in the deserts of North Africa. It's a sobering encounter as tables turn and then turn again.

Alex Toth is generally given a co-writing credit with Archie Goodwin on "Lone Hawk", a story of World War I flying aces which celebrates the ebullient bravery of one Billy Bishop as he strikes deadly streaks across the skies of Europe and all the while heroes die. Nifty twist in this one indeed.

The "Combat Quiz" in this issue was illustrated by Angel Torres.

"Holding Action" is a tale drawn by John Severin set in the Korean War and as Blazing Combat tales do so very very well puts the reader into the trench alongside the soldier. This time a soldier must confront his fear and what that transforms him into is scarier still. 

Archie Goodwin's tales in Blazing Combat seem to have a common bond and that is that war is fought by and around real human beings who are changed by the experience. Goodwin and his excellent cadre of artists make us experience those changes, make us feel, if only for a moment and in the most ephemeral of ways, the costs of waging war. It's no wonder the war makers of this country were bothered by this little comic book magazine. The powers that were started to boycott the magazine, in hopes of choking it out of existence, but not before two more issues were created. 

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Blazing Combat One!

James Warren had a surprise hit when he joined forces with Forry Ackerman and created Famous Monsters of Filmland. That success led Warren to see if he might not be able to recreate some of the great success of EC Comics which had been driven from the newsstands many years before because of general outrage at their most extreme content with little regard for their more literary aspects. He copied their horror format with Creepy and kept it free of the Comics Code by making it a true-blue magazine, albeit black and white. 

Creepy was also a success and that meant more needed to be done perhaps. And Warren liked EC's Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, two war comics edited by Harvey Kurtzman with a degree of sophistication above the normal ultra-patriotic blather of other war mags. So came into being Blazing Combat, a magazine about war but with a more nuanced story. That story would be written almost exclusively by the late great Archie Goodwin. Due to circumstances beyond the control of Warren and his company the magazine was not a financial success, but it has always been deemed a critical one. On Saturdays in March the Dojo will be taking an issue by issue look at the four mags which comprise the full run. Today we begin with the debut issue.

Beneath a highly energetic Frank Frazetta cover, the first story drawn by Joe Orlando in the mag was titled "Viet-Cong!" and immediately we see that the stories here will be more timely and more suspect of all aspects of waging war. We meet an American soldier who is assigned to advise a South Vietnamese troop as they enter the villages of the country and ferret out the Viet-Cong. Their methods are brutal and the American has reservations about what the United States might be doing. Radical stuff in the mid-60's!

The second story is titled "Aftermath" and was drawn by Angelo Torres. This set more safely in the past of the American Civil War and shows two soldiers from both sides demonstrating humanity and savagery as the war demands.

The third story is titled "Flying Tigers" and is drawn by veteran war artist George Evans and tells how this famous entourage made their bones and became a legit force under General Claire Chenault.

"Long View" is beautifully illustrated by Gray Morrow and takes us to World War II in the Pacific Theater and shows the strain and stress of one squad as they have to perform a deadly mission for the good of the overall effort. This one is rife with emotion and speaks to the brutal nature of warfare.

"Cantigny" drawn by Reed Crandall is set in World War I and features a soldier who is going home but who is a little disappointed he's not even seen the enemy. Of course during the story he does just that.

There's a one-page "Combat Quiz" drawn by Alex Toth followed by the American Revolutionary yarn about the unpredictable battlefield success of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. This one was drawn by Tex Blaisdell with help from others.

The mag closes out with another WWII story drawn by John Severin, an artist who aside from DC's Joe Kubert is likely more associated with the genre than any other. In this story of a Sergeant who tackles battle with a brutality which is perhaps unjustified in the end.

War is not some happy-go-lucky lark as seen in Marvel's Sgt.Fury comics or even dark fables of humanity as seen sometimes in DC's later war books, but here we bet a sense of the immediacy of war and the fragmenting of the human spirit it causes. There's a sense of reality here that is not evident from others, and that reality makes the stories more powerful.

More Blazing Combat next week.

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