Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Wally Wood War


This 1995 full color reprint comic is actually entitled MASTER'S (sic) SERIES Vol. 1 No. 1. Under what has to be one of the dullest comic book covers ever (painted by an unnamed artist from a Wood panel inside) the reader is presented with six war stories originally done by Wally Wood (possibly with dan Adkins) for Charlton Comics in the mid-1960's. Most of the stories are far from his best work and feature uninteresting writing with Charlton's trademark annoying machine lettering. There's a brief inside cover introduction that explains why Charlton was unique amongst comics companies and points out that the reprinted pieces come from WAR & ATTACK # 1 and D-DAY # 2, both comics code approved issues. Other than that there is no information on the reprints themselves. Only one story, LONE DEFENDER, seems to have any real life to it. In fact, if not for the lettering, one might mistake its highly detailed art as being from a previously unpublished EC war story!
To sum up, published by a company called ACG-America's Comics Group--this comic offers lesser quality Wood war comics reprints for the completist and it offers them on better (if still cheap) paper than the originals and with better color!

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, I came across this one a few months ago. It is ropey old stuff!

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  2. Still WW is WW, so I need to pick that one up. Thanks!

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  3. The Charlton material must have been done after Wood left MAD and prior to his stint at Marvel in 1964. Wood did a lot of stuff for Vince Colletta that was published by Charlton, Russ Jones assisted him during the period, this was before Dan Adkins started working for Woody. Russ spoke of his experiences with Wood in Bhob Stewart's book, AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD and in Comic Book Artist #14.

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