WALLY WOOD'S WOMEN

This is about Wally Wood.

I love the way Wood used to draw women in glamor poses (above), even when they were casually walking down the street.

Even his sci-fi was full of glamor poses. A wife tearfully saying goodbye to a husband leaving for Mars wasn't above striking a calendar pose. Amazingly the off-topic poses didn't diminish the seriousness of the story.

Wood obviously did this because he thought it was funny, but I'm guessing that it was also because his photo reference (above) came from ads and mens magazines. 50s glamor was very stylized. Even ice-cream could be sold with bombshell poses. The era wasn't interested in looking natural, and neither was Wood.

Unfettered by naturalism Wood was free to figure out his own way of walking women. I like that better than the literal stuff we do now.

I imagine that this (above) is the way women really walk in heels.  It's different than what Wood did, but that doesn't mean Wood was wrong. Cartooning and animation aren't about realism, they're about caricature....

...and nobody caricatured better than Wood. Imagine how this walk (above) would have looked in animation. Imagine how much fun it would have been to draw. It would even have been fun to draw the discombobulated men she passed.

Surprisingly animation never picked up on Wood's unique way of drawing sexy walks. Too bad, the subject (above) was far from exhausted.

Animation's in a rut, don't you think? I yearn for something new and different. 

I'm thinking only of walks here, but I don't mean something X-rated. I mean something "G" or "PG" that's funny, and which a family could watch together without the parents falling asleep. 

Geez, all this is making me want to draw.