The Spawn of Venus and Other Stories Illustrated by Wallace Wood. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2025, 216pp. $39.99.
Review by Paul Buhle
The Great Bohemian of comic books’ grandest moments, Wallace (aka “Wally”) Wood drew like a genius for a number of publishers before falling to overwork, too many cigarettes and too much liquor. EC loved him the best, and it was a mutual feeling, notwithstanding the inevitable tensions of artist, collective/collaborative work process, and the reality of a boss.
Wally Wood in his prime, excerpt from “My World,” Weird Science #22, 1953.
This splendid volume collects some of his finest Sci-Fi—he was also among the greatest satirical artists for Mad Comics—from forgotten series titles like Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and Incredible Science Fiction of the early 1950s. It also offers much woderful contextual material, commentary by serious scholars—university professors but mostly otherwise—to individual stories and collaborations, from editors to scriptwriters to presumably lowly inkers.
Most “classics” comic art volumes these days contain a hat-tipping of industry insiders. Same here. Howard Chaykin, vaunted comic artist (and a short time assistant to Wood) does not have a lot to say beyond describing Wood’s talent, nor does the appropriately admiring Larry Hama, of today’s GI Joe, itself a remnant of another and in this case, less pleasant, aka Cold War, comics era. S.S. Ringenberg, a comic scriptwriter, and fan-interviewer works harder with a biographical introductory sketch that goes little beyond ground familiar to Woods devotees, but reminds us sharply of the nature of the self-destructive genius. Wood put a gun to his head in 1981, leaving no note. The career disappointments were real, especially for an artist who worked hard at improving his style. But by that time, two divorces and a separation, he became too exhausted to keep himself in check. Besides, the glory years of the older comic art had been long past, and he was not suited to the new comix generation. His barely controlled artistic id did not find a home in the ill-paying Undergrounds.
Meanwhile, in the substantial Introduction,Tommy Burns and Jon Gothold go through the stories one by one, in such detail that no biographer of a novelist may ever have done better. Do we need such detail? Perhaps not every reader will think so, but among the plot summaries, these scholarly-minded critics offer so many small insights that the net result is remarkable, and demands several readings for details.
Wood reached his apex, arguably, in adapting the stories of Ray Bradbury, and this tells us much of what need to know about the vital and lasting importance of Wood’s work. This reviewer came upon Bradbury’s writings around age 10 or 11, in the Republican political/cultural climate of Central Illinois where the perceptions of sophisticated New Yorkers, for instance, would have been unusual and likely mistrusted. Mad Comics explained McCarthyism in the most penetrating and hilarious fashion. Bradbury, who was personally close to the Hollywood Blacklisted, found ways in his stories and novels to explore the takeover of public space, the waning of the New Deal stress for reform in favor of forced patriotism, but also unapologetic commercialization of daily life. He saw the future and it looked bad.
Thus, famously, Fahrenfeit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, made into feature films but only after the worst of McCarthyism had faded. Bradbury had been trying for years to send out warnings, even while he was making a living and a reputation (including a personal move to Hollywood) in a Sci-Fi field with leftist underpinnings going back to the 1930s. He also badly wanted to escape being pegged as a “genre writer,” but never made it and did not need to: we loved him anyway.
Photo funnies tribute in The Spawn of Venus and Other Stories.
Wally Wood so internalized the logic of Bradbury that stories composed by others at EC somehow have the “Bradbury Touch” in addition to the EC Touch, which consists—leaving aside the art— in terse scripting and a surprise ending. Like the alien civilization in “He Walked Among Us,” where the Savior was actually an Earthman who preaches love and forgiveness is executed. Two thousand years (!) later, another Earth visitor learns that the aliens’ holy symbol is the rack, aka cross, where the presumed savior was tortured to death.*
You get the idea. Human folly in the Atomic Age has become toxic. Wood could have predicted what a willful destroyer like Musk would write about opening up the need for “planetary” civilizations when Earth has been plundered beyond repair.
Not that all the stories are like this. And Bradbury could not have featured the scantily-clad beauties, alongside the virile young males, that seemed to be a specialty for Wood. Earthmen fall in love with alien females who assume a delicious human form only… to revert back, inspiring horror. Humans landing on a distant planet learn that the babies born to them, urgently wanting love and care, may have a dozen arms and look like octopi or something else weird (in this case, mommy does not care, which sounds right).
How were Wood’s females all so young and buxom, you might ask? The mostly male and young readers of these comics didn’t likely ask at all. The happy dreamers of another story are space explorers kidnapped to service the all-female population of a planet whose males have died out after a war. The “scientifically selected” dames look awfully familiar.
Wood could also favor social criticism–with a dark turn. In one story here, tens of thousands of Earth people who disappear in bunches, every few hundred years, turn out to be farm edibles, as a scientist explains over…a turkey dinner. Actually, this was an EC Sci-Fi trope several times over, like the aliens in another EC comic who capture interplanetary humans to use their skins for…fashionable minkish coats, and so on. Why do we egotistical Homo sapiens think we can abuse the animal kingdom?
From “Spawn of Venus”
Wood also loved the occasional in-joke, with a drawing of himself in the final panel. Here, EC Comics miraculously predict unexpected events, like the appearance of flying saucers, or the rise of surgical sex change (think “Christine” Jorgenson in tabloid headlines of the time). A jowly comics publisher (could it be plump William Gaines, who inherited EC when his father died in a boating accident?) wants them to take “a loyalty oath” (cue to Joe McCarthy). After some alien hi-jinks, the real Wally confesses that he and his fellow artists are actually disguised Venusians saving the world from horrible-looking Martians!!! What those helpful Venusians might look like beneath their disguise…we will never know.
In the real world, EC’s marvelous Sci-Fi, “Real War” and humor series (MAD and PANIC) never reached the sales level of its various, blood-dripping but also deeply satirical horror comics, also full of plot reversals and revenge-justice. Gaines was called upon, in the famous Congressional hearings (held in the same Manhattan courtroom as “Red” hearings a few years earlier), to explain the horror as something less than dangerous to young minds. The inquisitors weren’t listening to his answers, and the guillotine blade fell on a glorious moment in popular art.
Wally Wood outlived his time, this is the tragedy of his life and not only his. Harvey Kurtzman and his trusted artists hit their peak as satirists, also arguably as editors and artists, in their twenties and early thirties. Some became highly successful illustrators. None could recapture the magic.
Paul Buhle
*Let it be known that the Ray Bradbury Museum rests in the blue collar city of Waukegan, Ilinois, which only happens to be my wife’s hometown.
ONTEMPORARY CRITICS’ RECOGNITON of “Outsider Art” can be said to have come early to its precursor, Underground Comix of the late 1960s and 1970s. “Recognition,” that is, in the best way: publication—albeit with a real if fleeting audience—far from any recognized, official art scene. Thus artist/nonartist Michael McMillan. A leftover from those days and now past 90, he fairly inhabits this book of his past drawings and sculptures, with a standout introduction by Crumb biographer Dan Nadel and supportive blurbs from the likes of Gary Panter and Bill Griffith.
