Dead Bode Erotica by A.L. Sirois

I spotted this fascinating page in an early issue of NATIONAL SCREW featuring Wood's MALICE IN WONDERLAND strip. Published briefly in the mid-seventies, NATIONAL SCREW, a spinoff of the newspaper SCREW, was an unusual hybrid that attempted to have cutting edge softcore porn photos alongside mainstream authors and articles and mixed with NATIONAL LAMPOON style humor.

This particular piece is clearly both an homage and a dark-humored tribute to the late artist Vaughn Bode' who had accidentally killed himself not long before. Noting that the piece was dedicated "To Woody," I then noted the signature as that of A.L. Sirois, Wood's assistant during this period whom we already know had helped out on the MALICE strip.

I contacted Al for the story behind this tasteless li'l tribute and asked if he and/or Wood were Bode' fans.

"Tasteless… yeah, well, no one is perfect. That was my first professionally published piece of comic work, and I'm sure NS published it only because I was working for Wood and they were courting him. I don't recall Woody coming down on one side or the other about Bode's work. I was a big Bode fan myself, believe it or not, but inclined to be more than a little iconoclastic in my youth. A lot of people seemed to find that piece funny. I did a number of other strips for NS, all of them pretty tasteless."