Written and Illustrated by Basil Wolverton
Edited by Steve Sadowski
Published by Fantagraphics Books
Scoop Scuttle and His Pals serves up nearly 200 zany pages of Basil Wolverton’s crazy classic color comics stories. Why haven’t you ordered it yet?
Booksteve recomme…
Hold on. My phone. I’m sorry about this. I’ll just be a sec.
Hello?
What’s that, Chief? Too short, you say? But what else needs to be said? I mean, seriously, it’s Bas…But…I mean…CHIEF! Watch your lang…! Fine, fine. Okay…I said okay, okay? I got this. Right. I’ll…Just gimme a minute. I’ll…Chief, I can’t talk and type, you know! Hello? Hello?
Ahem! Anyway, as I was about to type before I was so rudely interrupted…
Basil Wolverton’s style of humor is pretty close to unique in comic books. It grew instead out of the grand tradition of the anything goes screwball newspaper comic strip, particularly to my eyes as personified in cartoonist Bill Holman’s long-running Smokey Stover.
Smokey was a fireman and much of that strip’s off (and on)-the-wall humor grew from his interactions with his boss while failing miserably at doing his job. Similarly, Basil Wolverton’s Scoop Scuttle is a goofy newspaper reporter whose editor adds to the consistent insanity found in his stories. In imitating the newspapers’ Bill Holman, Basil Wolverton managed to somehow come up with something unique and inimitable in comic books—Basil Wolverton.
“Unique” is a word that gets used too often these days, and much of the time it’s used incorrectly. In this case, though, Wolverton’s art really is unique in that it is instantly recognizable and doesn’t really look like the work of anyone else who ever drew for a comic book.
Although he drew a relative handful of serious science fiction and horror stories, it’s his humor work that gets remembered. It popped up at numerous publishers throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, from Powerhouse Pepper at Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics, not seen here, to Scoop Scuttle, Mystic Moot and His Magic Snoot, Bingbang Buster, and Jumpin’ Jupiter, all seen here.
Wolverton achieved national notoriety when he was chosen as the celebrated winner of Al Capp’s “Draw Lena the Hyena” contest, in which he designed the memorable look for the previously unseen “world’s ugliest woman” in the Li’l Abner newspaper strip. Boris Karloff was one of the celebrity judges for the contest. The event had been so big in America that after his win and Lena’s big reveal, Basil was covered in Life and made TV appearances.
Eventually, his work popped up in Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad. His increasingly insane-looking characters and creatures were favorites of the underground artists in the 1960s and the new generation of overground artists as well. Some 20 years after leaving four color comics, all-new freaky Wolverton creations highlighted every early cover of DC’s Plop! as well as the first issue of Marvel’s Crazy.
So, yeah. Wolverton. He’s a big deal and occupies a—hey, here’s that word again—unique place in the history of comics. Although nearly unknown to the majority of today’s fans, Fantagraphics’ Scoop Scuttle and His Pals, edited and with highly informative background info by Wolverton scholar Greg Sadowski, should go a long way toward bringing comics’ goofiest, screwiest, zaniest, craziest, wackiest, wonkiest crackpot cartoonist back into the spotlight. Tell your friends. Wolverton was the Robin Williams of comics! This book is FUUUUN-NEE!
So there.
Ahem. Sorry, sorry! I mean…Booksteve recommends.
