Tuesday, June 15, 2010

WALLY WOOD REVEALS THE FUTURE!

Nobody understood the future like Wally Wood.  He knew that our successors will have emotional conflicts just like we do, and that many a future spat will be settled with a laser blast. Here (above) two young space patrolers squabble under the ceiling of a futuristic bachelor pad owned by a nice old granny. The spaceman's wrinkly suit appears to be caught in his buttocks, but no one seems to notice.



I love the way Wood handles his backgrounds. All his characters, even villains, creatures and old ladies, take an obvious delight in cavorting around the 50s furniture. Wood would have loved Ikea, which is as close to a real-life Wood theme park as we're likely to see. 




















Wood rightly assumed that future men will lust over beautiful babes the same way we do now.  He knew that women will spend a lot of time lounging around their pads in see-through clothing, and will therefore get lots of calls from guys on their video phones.
 
 




























He foresaw that young men would live in spotlessly clean, high tech apartments in the tropical jungle. No bugs or mud, just friendly, beautiful neighbors.



Wood also knew that beautiful girls will have no need to take rocket ships to other worlds.  Every strange, loathsome beast in the galaxy will sooner or later come to them.






Last of all, Wood knew that tail fin cars would make a comeback, and that the future would be full of them. How did he know!? It's uncanny!




















13 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:37 AM

    Now that is the future I'd wanna live in! No threat of global warming here, except from the babes, if you know what I mean. Add the Smell-o-vision we were supposed to have by the year 2000 and you have the perfect prediction of the future.

    Interestingly enough, The Science Channel used to show this interesting documentary predicting how the future was going to turn out by 2050, and everything was controlled by a central computer system or something. I barely remember it now, but maybe you've seen it before. It aired a few years ago, back in 2006.

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  2. Love Wally Wood. I still think Kurtzman and Wood's classic Superduperman! (1953) is the epitome of comic art in America, (along with Capp's Fearless Fosdick and Kelly's "Simple J. Malarky"). This stuff is fun; the all-important missing ingredient.

    Modern sci-fi (and I'm including the highly-inbred, inexplicably popular superhero genre) seems dreary, dark and pretentious in comparison. Made for adults with arrested development, irony-deficiencies and the attention spans of gnats (Ouch! Sorry, fanboys...), they can't touch this stuff.

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  3. I absolutely love Wally Wood's visions of the future. I'm sure it's mostly just nostalgia for what "the future" used to look like. I also love his jazz nuts and their crazy pads that he did frequently in Mad.

    BTW, there's a wonderful book about Wood called "Against the Grain: Mad Artist Wallace Wood" by Bhob Stewart.

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  4. It's a man's world in the future...& killing a spider in the kitchen is a man's job!

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  5. Thats a future I look forward to living in.

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  6. when i think of this genius dying broke alone and in pain in a crappy hotel room, it just breaks my heart. i once worked with a guy who was once woods assistant for a short time, when wally wood died this guy grabbed a lot of woods drawings and tried to sell them, he wasnt too successful, there was no internet then, so it took time, he got frustrated and just gave some away, i got a few, 3 exactly, they aint going anywhere, this is the first time ive publicly mention them, i need to do something with them , maybe donate them to a cartoon museum, his generation of artist is slowly fading, guys who could do it all! animation, cartooning, fine art, illustration, frazetta, kurtzman,elder, dicarlo-all gone, take note future artists-these are your masters.

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  7. These are just asking for captions.

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  8. Anonymous9:48 PM

    Wally Wood illustrated how 50s rock'n'roller kids would grow up to be as adults, speaking of the future. Actually, he's not to far off nailing some boomers. I believe it is reprinted in MAD About The 50s.

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  9. Mike: I think you're right about Superduperman, especially the first half of that story. Fosdick is great! I'll have to look up Simple J. Malarky.

    Talking: Originals!? I'm envious. Once, at the San Diego Con, I bought some original Wood gouache dwrgs that he did for Mad. I put them in a shopping bag which I checked into the cloakroom. Later I discovered they were missing. A word to the wise...keep your valuables with you.

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  10. Mark: I have that book! It's great!

    Roberto: Even when Wood illustrated a downer story, he managed to sneak in his vision of a cool, fun to experience future.

    Mike: I like what you said about fun!

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  11. [I'll have to look up Simple J. Malarky]

    Oops, misspelled! It's actually Simple J. Malarkey, from Pogo. Malarkey was Walt Kelly's famous spoof of Tail-Gunner Joe McCarthy.

    I was actually referring to the brilliant "Who Stole the Tarts" trial sequence Kelly did, using the character in an Alice in Wonderland milieu. It's reprinted in Pogo Panorama, which is the book that convinced me (back in 1977 when it came out) that I wanted to become a cartoonist. I'll have to show it to you one of these days...

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  12. Well, at least he was right about the furniture.

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  13. Mike this is lowbrow retrofuture bull shit modern sci-fi is great a good example is the stuff at orionsarm.com

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