Wednesday, April 8, 2009

A Style Unique to Himself

So I know the last post of Prince Violent is pretty common for any true Wood fan, but bear with me, I'm trying to establish a thread here, although I know it's pretty tenuous.





Here's a case where he repeated an earlier concept, maybe as an homage to himself, or even a self parody. The panel above from the early 1950s, obviously, and the panel below from 1969.

The above panel is from Dragonella, the back story in Heroes Inc., a 1969 comic book that was intended for and distributed to a military audience. I don't know if this was pre Sally Forth, but obviously Cannon is the lead feature.

I got this copy from my Sarge that he brought back from a PX in Vietnam. He had a handful of comics in his footlocker (along with God knows what else), and he traded this comic for a pack of smokes. He used up those smokes in a day, I've had this comic for 37 years. C'est le guerre.

It looks like Woody had great hopes for all this, according to his promo letter below:

But as you can see below, compared to the color version in the last post, things change. 

By 1975, the reprint was in black and white, it had a single credit line for Wood, and was retouched throughout to show a little nudity. Wood was doing what Wood felt needed to be done.


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