The Humour Comics of Basil Wolverton (No. 94)

The Humour Comics of Basil Wolverton (1942-1973)

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Basil Wolverton is one of the few comic book artists who could be considered for a list of this type on the basis of a single drawing. The amazingly grotesque, lurid, and goofily funny single-panel drawings in the Wolverton style - most famously seen in the 1946 "Lena the Hyena" contest winner for Al Capp's Li'l Abner strip - have an almost tactile quality to them. No one working in such a cartoony style ever achieved that same sense of real life possibility - that one of Wolverton's deformed to abstraction critters could be in the same room sweating, grinning innocently, and looking up at you. 

All of Wolverton's work is worth seeking out - from the rip-roaring adventure comic Space Hawk (which appeared in the early '40s and was the subject of a well conceived reprinting by Dark House Comics) to his late-period Bible work - but it is in a run of humour comics that Wolverton is best represented. The vast majority of Wolverton's humour work appeared in the 1940s. The best-remembered and most accomplished is Powerhouse Pepper, a spin on the decent-hearted-dimwit-as-hero shtick distinguished by Wolverton's energetic art, grotesque character drawings, and the fact that the dialogue was done in chaotic rhyme. But even the minor strips and occasional appearances in Mad or the covers for DC's Plop! are a gas.

Basil Wolverton's art and approach to comics remains influential today. Just as offbeat children's television hosts of the 1950s had a dramatic effect on satirical television programs of the 1970s and 1980s, Wolverton's comics were a launching pad for many of the wilder forays of the underground generation's work, and all comics still holding to that tradition.

FURTHER READING:

Basil Wolverton at Fantagraphics Books
TCJ Article: Delirious Drivel on the Daft Doodler (2021)
TCJ Review: The Brain Bats of Venus (2019)
TCJ Article: Ron Goulart's Correspondence with Basil Wolverton (2012)