Basil Wolverton- Master Cartoonist

[Ryan Goble]

Joselyn Santos posted this interesting article from the Village Voice in the Art Educators Group... she said

"Hey everyone I recently checked out this show and it was incredible! The attention to detail in Wolverton's cartoons reminds me of Robert Crumbs work but a bit more surreal. Go check it out, a link to a article on the show is below."

Article Below from here

Best in Show

Basil Wolverton at Gladstone Gallery; 'Portraits: In Pursuit of Likeness' at International Print Center; James Cohan Gallery's 'White Noise'
By Robert Shuster

Tuesday, June 30th 2009 at 1:11pm

• Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

  
  
  
  

  Spend some face time with Wolverton: George, 1955

Details:

Basil Wolverton
Gladstone Gallery
515 W 24th Street, 212-206-9300
Through August 14

For better or for worse, master cartoonist Basil Wolverton may have single-handedly altered thousands of boys' psyches. In a 50-year career, marvelously surveyed here, Wolverton provided 13-year-old nerds (and more than a few adults) with a nearly inexhaustible supply of comics on pre-teen fantasies: richly imagined sci-fi exploits, slapstick violence, visions of Armageddon, and, best known for their appearances in Mad magazine, the most grotesque faces ever drawn.

Wolverton first rose to prominence in 1946, when Al Capp's Li'l Abner ran a contest (judged by Boris Karloff, Frank Sinatra, and Salvador Dalí!) to depict Lena the Hyena, a character so ugly, Capp joked, that he couldn't draw her. Wolverton won, hands down, with a creature bearing the kind of hideous distortions (giant crooked teeth, a snaking nose, a deformed ear) that would define the cartoonist's enduring and influential style. What makes Wolverton's vulgarity so appealing is the expert draftsmanship, particularly the careful details (like pustules and saliva) and a meticulous cross-hatching, which lends his characters a solid presence and coats them with a kind of fine-grained dirt. With pathos so fully realized, your disgust gives way to sympathy.

Wolverton, who died in 1978, had a knack, too, for nightmarish drama, exemplified by a stunning, densely inked illustration from 1935 sci-fi pulp, in which a gun-toting corpse floats menacingly above a wary astronaut. But Wolverton saved his most enthralling pieces for the Bible. An ordained minister for a wacky Oregon church, he produced, in the mid 1950s, a series of apocalyptic scenes for the Book of Revelations; men and women, foregrounded in close-up, writhe under dominant skies of fire, plague, and war. Though many classify Wolverton's work as goofy humor, the show makes clear that his real subject, whatever the context, was human frailty.

[Peter Gutierrez]

Basil Wolverton's work for kids (Powerhouse Pepper) will be included in the "TOON Treasury of Funny Comics For Kids" (Mouly, Spiegelman, eds.) due out from Abrams sometime later this year -- that may represent a way for educators to bring such classic creators into the classroom.

[Ryan Goble]

P to the G - thanks for sharing that resource, be sure to remind us when the book becomes available!

RRG:)