Here's one of the great missed opportunities. Warren's EERIE # 131 is a special tribute to Wally Wood issue and yet the cover is by...Rudy Nebres?? Love him or hate him, Nebres' style just isn't particularly Wood-like! Published as a "tribute" to Wood on the occasion of his death, this issue reprints 6 of his Warren stories seemingly at random along with an obit up front. Unlike the similar Steve Ditko tribute issue (with Ditko, of course, still alive) this one just seems like a quick cash-in. Nebres' cover presents Wood's staples by the numbers--heroic spaceman, sleek rocket, facial shadows, blonde babe and slimy monster. In spite of that, if you hadn't TOLD me this was a tribute to Wood, I would not have recognized it. In fact, I didn't and passed this up on the stands in 1982! I get the fact that Wood was no longer around to do a cover. Had he been, Warren as a company had so pissed him off that they would have probably had to pay through the nose to get one out of him anyway! How tough, though, would it have been to have utilized a scene from one of his excellent stories or even some generic sci-fi illustration he had done? Maybe even re-use the SPACEMEN cover he had done years earlier. Warren was nearing the end here, though, and what should have been a nice tribute to one of their longest contributors comes off like a rush job. The art, of course, still holds up and this is a nice addition to any Wood collection but still somehow disappointing.
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