Showing posts with label wally wood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wally wood. Show all posts

Thursday, July 24, 2014

I9TH CENTURY STAGE DESIGN

I confess to liking the old-fashioned theatrical backdrops (above) of the 19th Century.


I think it was the sets in the old Melies films (above) that won me over. Look at the one above...bathing beauties, military men and a scientific space canon all sharing the same scene with the intriguing rooftop world of the big city. All those aspects of reality within one frame...what an interesting idea!


I also like the 19th Century style long shots in some of the old Fleischer cartoons. I like the idea that at odd times we're catapulted into a larger reality that gives us a different perspective on the story. Using ultra long shots only to establish a scene is a waste of a powerful tool. 


Old time theatrical backdrops had lots of balconies, windows, winding paths, caves and ledges. I guess the stage designers felt that was the way to get the most bang for their buck. That's okay...those old sets produced a surreality that reinforced the unnatural dialogue delivery and over-the-top stories of the day.


Someone who likes that old style doesn't have to slavishly copy the 19th Century. It's an idea that easily adapts to modern aesthetics. Here's a modern home that uses it. In houses like the one above you get a glimpse into multiple realities with just one glance, and there's plenty of hiding places, opportunity for unwelcome intruders to avoid detection, spying, sudden escapes, chases, athletic moves, dances and surprises.



Here's (above) a home design by Wally Wood that follows the same principal.


Friday, December 23, 2011

MORE ABOUT WALLY WOOD'S ARCHITECTURE

Let's take a closer look at the Wally Wood architecture that I posted a few days ago. There was a lot going on there and one post wasn't enough to cover it.


Well, to begin with, we all know Wood is fond of tight spaces. He uses perspective cheats to make them appear more spacious, and that's a great technique. His spaces are simultaneously wide and cramped. There's no reason why real architecture can't do this. 


Wood intuitively knows that tight spaces and varying levels (above) are sheltering and nurturing. We naturally seek safety in places like that.  A house full of gullies and alcoves and ledges and interesting reveals fits the kind of creature we are.

Of course a home consisting of nothing but tight spaces would be claustrophobic. I like the way Wood opens up the space in front of the entrance. Immediately upon entering the house (or is it an apartment?) you're confronted with a choice: whether to walk down into the living room or up onto the second floor. From the vantage point of the door both choices are visible and enticing.


I know what you're thinking...that some modern architecture (sample above) already does all that...but does it?  The examples I've seen are usually botched, like the bed above. Granted, it sits on a level or a ledge of sorts but it's lost in a gigantic, impersonal space. None of Wood's sheltering here.


For contrast, observe how Wood handles his levels (above). The levels resemble solid blocks. They seem to protect the girl sleeping in the single bed at the bottom of the stairs. I'm guessing that's a guest bed, which is also useful for reading and lounging in the middle of the day. Spacious closets could be hidden in the blocks. There's actually a lot of potential closet space here.

The sleeping hipster on the top level sacks out on the comfortable wall-to-wall carpet that covers the floors, stairs and walls. Currently wall carpets are dust traps, and are probably unhealthy, but the day can't be far off when the right material will make them practical.


Most modern architects are too fond of empty space (above). Wood seldom made that mistake.

Here's a large space that almost works. It would work a lot better with a low, nurturing, Wally Wood ceiling that would emphasize the wideness of the room.

Sigh! There's more to say on this subject, but it'll have to wait til after Christmas. I've got presents to wrap!

Let me lay on you........


Friday, July 09, 2010

MORE ABOUT WALLY WOOD



Remember this picture (above)? I put it up a week ago to illustrate the point that Wally Wood certainly loved his Ikea furniture. I kinda like it too. Thanks to Ikea, anybody can have a 50s bachelor pad at a reasonable price. 

Anyway, I thought the picture above deserved a second look. It reminds me that the young and struggling Wood was probably pretty dependant on his magazine reference. Before he worked on Mad, Wood shared an office with realistic artists Frazetta and Williamson, and was under a lot of pressure to improve his realistic drawing quickly. 























For interior backgrounds Wood seemed to prefer reference that that emphasized perspective and the blocky nature of furniture. My guess is that he chose these because he was insecure about his use of perspective and found the clarity and simplicity of these mathematical pictures to be helpful. 


I like to think that somewhere along the line it dawned on him that the simple perspectives he was using were funny. Maybe he began to laugh at his own pictures. Maybe after a point he decided that competing with Williamson and Frazetta for realism was pointless, and he broke out into pure style. 




















You could argue that his handling of human characters evolved the same way. At first Wood relied heavily on magazine reference. The girl above strikes a fashion magazine pose when she points her gun.  Look at her legs and feet. That's an odd way to stand when you're supposed to be in the throws of murderous passion. 

Eventually Wood would transcend this too obvious use of reference, but a lot of people believe he did uniquely interesting work in this period, when he had a foot in both worlds, and was making a transition to something more stylized.  The reference anchored him, made his work more complex. The space patrol girl is funny in her model pose, but she's also dignified, confident, and iconic. Her contradictions make her a puzzle that we enjoy trying to solve. And it all takes place in a bizarre bachelor pad full of obsessively blocky shapes. 

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Could this (above) have been the magazine ad that Wood referenced?   The legs are the same, so is the hair style...sort of.  The model's also off balance, just like the space girl in Wood's picture. 


Anyway, this is what I'm arguing here: that first out of necessity, then by choice, Wood thrust Pepsi Generation models into outer space to encounter hideous monsters.


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!




















Sunday, July 05, 2009

FRAZETTA VS. WOOD


It isn't often that you get to compare the work of your favorite artists in some way that can lay claim to being objective. Maybe the closest you could get to a fair contest would be one in which both artists attempted to illustrate the same story, without being able to reference each other's work. Well, that's what we have here: Frazetta and Wood illustrating the same story. There's no stylistic similarity, so I'm guessing that neither saw how the other handled the story.

Hold your hats, it's going to be a battle royal!



I can't put up every page of the story, so I'll just put up highlights of what each artist did with the beginning, middle and end. The finished, inked page way at the very top is by Wood. The pencil page immediately above is by Frazetta. Frazetta's pages only exist in pencil because the magazine folded before he could start on the inking.



That's one of Wood's middle pages above. The story goes something like this: a lonely bachelor is staying at his hunting lodge in the woods. A beautiful girl knocks on the door requesting help. Her car broke down, and she was pursued through the woods by someone or something intent on capturing her. The bachelor takes her in and offers her his protection. They start chatting and discover that each is the other's ideal mate. They fall deeply in love.



That's one of Frazetta's middle pages above.




Here's (above) the next Frazetta page. As their love deepens an announcement is heard on the radio.



Above, the next Frazetta page.

The radio announcer says a beautiful blonde mad woman has escaped from the local asylum. The announcer warns that she's very beguiling, but is not to be trusted. She's a homicidal maniac who slowly cuts up and horribly mutilates her victims. Under no circumstances should anyone let her into their home.

The bachelor is horrified. He kicks the girl out, locks the door, and spends the night upright in a chair, holding a rifle. Outside the girl begs to be let in.

She says they both found the true love of their lives in the cabin. She says he needs to trust that, and not the radio. She says the maniac is approaching. How, she asks, could he leave the girl he loves defenseless, in the hands of a fiend? With great difficulty the bachelor listens to blood-curdling screams all night. Finally the screams stop and the sun comes up. With gun in hand he opens the door to the porch.



That's Wood's page above.

The bachelor opens the door and discovers....the hacked, mutilated body of the girl he loved, and who he kicked out of the cabin. The girl, the love of his life who had pleaded for help, had been telling the truth all along.



That's Frazetta's final page, above. So who do you think won the competition? Who did the superior version of the story?

BTW, the format of the second version is different because it was undertaken later when the Congressional hearing on comics forced EC to recast their comics stories in magazine form. The reasoning was that magazines are assumed to be for adults and are therefore less vulnerable to censorship. The public didn't go for it. Sales of the magazine format declined (Mad excepted) and the horror titles fizzled out. Poor Frazetta was ordered to seize work on the magazine story before he could finish it.

I assume that he never saw the earlier Wood version because there's no similarity in the approach.

Also BTW: Thanks to Milt for bringing this to my attention and providing the artwork.




Wednesday, March 26, 2008

AYN RAND, BARBARA STANWYCK, AND WALLY WOOD

What do Ayn Rand (above), Barbara Stanwyck and Wally Wood have in common? They all lived 20 minutes or less from my house! Of course that was the era before the land was sub-divided into housing developments. Come to think of it, Jimmy Cagney lived around here too, in Porter Ranch, but I don't know exactly where. In LA no part of the city is more than a stone's throw from some kind of historical film landmark.

Yesterday Milt Grey and I decided to get in a car and look up the sites where the homes of these people used to be. I wish I'd thought to bring along extra batteries for the camera. I only managed to get a few pictures but you might still be interested to see what we came up with.



Barbara Stanwyck (above) and Ayn Rand were next-door neighbors in what is now called Northridge. That's right, Northridge, where the Earthquake was.



Here's (above) a picture of Ayn Rand's house, address: 10000 Tampa Blvd., taken in the 1940s when half the valley was still covered with orange groves. It was originally designed by Neutra for film director Erik Von Sternberg.


Today the house is gone and in it's place is a public junior high, Noble Middle School. I had to get this picture off the net because my camera froze.



10000 Tampa is a few blocks up from the local mall, The Northridge Fashion Center. It's funny to think of people at the mall's book store perusing Rand books that were written only a few blocks away.


After Northridge we headed in the opposite direction to Wally Wood's (portrait above) last apartment at 15150 Parthenia in Van Nuys.



We discovered a somewhat run-down neighborhood but I imagine it was OK when Wally was there. My camera started working again so I got this picture of the side of the building where Wood had a street-level entrance. That's his apartment behind the grey car.


To get to Wood's apartment (above) you turn right after opening the brown gate.


And that's his place, number 71. I met the occupant and she was delighted to learn that a famous artist lived here. I didn't have the heart to tell her that Wood shot himself there. It was three days before the body was found.

According to Milt, Wood came to LA to find work in animation because it was getting harder and harder to make a living doing comics in New York. He was desperate for money because he had kidney problems which required expensive dialysis treatments. He tried to sell projects to Hanna Barbera and others but nobody was buying. I think his final work was comics for a local porn publisher, a real come-down for someone of Wood's stature.

I'm tempted to say that a gloom hung over the apartment, but really it was just the opposite. In bright mid-day it was positively cheery. Thank God life carries on.

Friday, May 25, 2007

WOOD'S DISNEY PARODY


Here's a parody of Disney's characters from a 1960s satire magazine called "The Realist." Wood was actually a big fan of Disney. Maybe that's why the quality of the artwork is so good. Click to enlarge.