web hosting short URLs photo sharing

Echoes of Wally Wood in Tom Strong

Comics that reference the comics medium itself, through imitation, pilferage, and tributes can succeed or fail based on the breadth of the reference and the quality of the source material. Recent issues of Tom Strong, for some, seem to lack focus because of the amount of genre-hopping and borrowed material Alan Moore infuses for various chapters. However, originality clamors for release mainly from those talents incapable of it, a failing that, as yet, does not apply to Moore's work.

Indeed, where Moore chooses to mine older material, he generally manages to make it say more than did the original (and often to say things that Code-approved source material never dared to utter). Nonetheless, when writing in a lighter vein, Moore does not fear to take Tom Strong into a territory composed more of tribute than exploration of Great Ideas. The Great Ideas, after all, will wait until Moore gets back to them.

Thus, as both a treat and diversion from ongoing themes in the series, Alan Moore and Hilary Barta explored the specific work of a much-missed talent who established himself in his youth through excellent work both with Will Eisner on pieces collectively called "The Outer Space Spirit" and through multi-genre work for the ill-starred EC Comics.

Wood, in brief, enjoyed a great deal of critical success as a young artist in the 1950s, where his science fiction and humor pieces would stand above the standards of the medium as they existed then. Later in his career, Wood would reappear at various mainstream publishers, and furthermore would train a number of talents who cut their artistic teeth serving him as assistants. From the sixties onward, he would continue working in mainstream comics, though less frequently and for shorter assignments, starting with a brief stint at Marvel where he did some work on Daredevil and Avengers. In his fifties, he suffered a stroke that left him unable to handle his drawing implements, and took his own life. Subsequent decades, from the eighties onward, have seen an increasing respect for his better works, and the occasional tribute creeps in to more modern comics, such as the recent story in Tom Strong that reads, in some ways, as a love-letter to Wood's humor style.

Tom Strong #14 presents a tale of a vacation gone horribly wrong, in the fifties humor style of Wally Wood, complete with multiple signature flourishes and technical tributes not always obvious to the casual reader.

The Tribute

The story "Space Family Strong" begins with the Strongs, in 1954, taking a vacation on the planet Theta Incognita VI, where a space traveler's tour guide promises tourists will encounter all manner of beautiful and clement vacation conditions. Naturally enough, the reader can observe matters going terribly wrong from landfall.

A combination of monsters, low gravity, high (multi-)solar radiation, and ponds of acid conspire to create a respectable load of misery, with fires and accidents with his daughter Tesla achieving escape velocity and becoming frozen in huge blocks of ice adding to the mayhem. However, Tom Strong's faith in the guide book endures, in spite the evidence of his eyes and the great amount of personal and materiel damage incurred through attempts to have fun in a hostile extraterrestrial wilderness.

Finally, when nitroglycerine begins to rain from the heavens and flying-saucer spawning sand castles launch attacks on our hero, his somewhat wiser spouse and daughter take to the air in the flying saucer and find a more hospitable place on Theta Incognita IV, where they enjoy an earthlike, but still exotic, tropical beach scene even as poor Tom remains stranded on a world where tiny flying saucers shoot him in the posterior with ray cannons. Dhalua muses over the guide book, where stuck-together pages created the impression that the description of hellish Theta Incognita VI enjoyed the fine features of tourism belonging to the more benign world.

Throughout this work, recognizable Wally Wood flourishes adorn the pages, although frequently failing to quite match the quality of their prototypes from the comics of 50 years previous. Wood features nonetheless leap out at the reader in the presence of signature monsters, dual-lighting effects, and even an obscure expletive that recurrently (and without explanation or definition) tended to intrude into humor comics pages from that period.

The Monsters

The scanned image immediately to the right, and subsequent images in this column, all derive from Wally Wood humor comics from the 1950s, just in the odd case that the stylistic differences between Wood and Barta seem less than obvious to the eye.

Monsters provided one particular method of recognizing Wood's pen in a story. The big pile of tentacles with a million razor-toothed mouths and multiple eyes - combining the salient features of slugs, trees, and, perhaps, phlegm - appeared occasionally in Wally Wood science fiction comics but fairly reliably in his science fiction parodies. One would not stray too far from the truth in calling such creatures "Wood monsters," though his EC peers sometimes resorted to a similar approach for the required bug-eyed-whatsis that a story might need.

This Flash Gordon parody included a number of monsters with silly features and sillier names, in between various types of dubious humanoids (rockmen, birdmen, treemen, airmen, and, most terrifying, menmen), but the one in the panel above fits well for a general prototype. Note that it does not differ too greatly from the monster in the scanned image in the previous section.

Wood's heavy use of blacks and often hyper-detailed style did much to add the grotesque to alien creatures revealed on many extraterrestrial EC landscapes, and one might reverentially note that a tribute to his work would necessarily remain incomplete without some kind of nod to his signature monsters.

The Double-Lighting

While not unique to Wally Wood, or, indeed, to the stable of EC artists making memorable comics in the early 1950s, double-lighting nonetheless tends to appear when folks examine the technical side of his work. Artists who admit to EC influences, such as Jim Steranko and Herb Trimpe, resorted to the technique more than once. The scanned image at the beginning of this column includes double-lit faces, plus the heavy blacks and hyperdetailed control panels that graced many Wood pages.

Dual lighting imitates the shadow patterns cast when a human face has lights shine on it from complementary, or approximately complementary directions in such a way that shadow runs down the central portion of the face while the sides remain illuminated. The technique adds a cinematic touch to comics and helps build the intensity of a panel or series of panels, particularly in the context of the characteristically Wood approach in the scanned sequence, above, where progressive panels zoom in on a dual-lit face as it enters more and more extreme close-up.

While this technique lends itself easily to abuse, it does show a higher standard of rendering than much early comics material, which provided flat-colored outlines but little in the way of cinematic shading.

"Spafon"

Some cursory research failed to turn up a meaning for the expletive "spafon" that appeared occasionally in word balloons in various stories from Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad. While I can't turn up a meaning for it - though I suspect something thoroughly disreputable may apply - I nonetheless recognize it as a familiar component from the old Mad comics.

For example, in the scanned sequence immediately above, it provides a name for the blond-haired "Captain Marbles" who serves as proxy and straw man for Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel, whom litigation would, in only a year or two after the appearance of this parody, eradicate from mainstream comics for two decades. Marvel's alter-ego Billy Batson here takes on the dubious moniker of "Billy Spafon."

An appropriately scholarly researcher with an adequate background in 1950s comics, Kurtzmaniana, and various flavors of ethnic slang common to the big cities of the eastern seaboard during that decade might have a better explanation; barring such exposition, however, we can at least classify "spafon" among recurring phonemes of no particular import, such as the frequent resort to the name "Melvin" in various Mad parodies of the day.

The Goal of Tribute

A tribute somewhat demonstrates one artist's (used in a general sense to include anyone involved in the creative process) respect for another artist's work. Neophiles - even the ones who have the wisdom to steer clear of the dogmatic positions that sometimes attach to their preference for the new as a good thing per se - often see in it a morbid nostalgia. To my eye, however, the tribute serves multiple functions, including setting the kind of standards that can help define a canon of comics, something that any form of art needs to put down as a foundation for its credibility. Furthermore, the tribute in general seems to serve two additional purposes:

1. The tribute shows readers the strong points that someone once (or, for that matter, currently) could bring to his work, such that an impartial observer could conclude that paeans to the talent of another represented more than verbal bombast.
2. The tribute reminds readers familiar with the honored-artist's work what they currently miss by his absence. This becomes more important in an age of comics more afflicted with monoculture and technical fads, when the work of an earlier day shows what existed before either of these conditions.

From the moment I recognized what Barta had in mind - and the splash panel at the beginning of this column reveals his intent rather unambiguously - I found the second tribute goal playing rather strongly, to the point that I had to go look up a number of my EC reprints, including the ones that provided scans for this page. Barta, for whatever flaws one might wish to find in the derivative style used in this story, made me remember why I like old Wood and why I miss his work.

The overly-serious reader, resenting some imaginary affront against dignity represented by having a humor story in a Tom Strong book - may fail to get this piece. The hypercritical analyst of art may fret that Barta did not perfectly replicate Wood's style. Yet both miss the point, the notion that Wood's material still has something to say to posterity and that the genre-hopping reflects a recognition of the richness of the comics medium.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 274. Completed 03-SEP-2001.