Original Art Friday 1/10/2020 Basil Wolverton!

I was considering spending my Friday destroying the EPA, speaking nothing but word salad and sniffing a lot, but since I am but a lowly writer and not the President of the Friggin' United States, I suppose I will have to eschew such pleasures for another edition of ORIGINAL ART FRIDAY. Yes, that one very special day of the week when I share another fine artwork from my scary accumulation of "stuff"...

Today I offer another fine work by the amazing Basil Wolverton. Because who doesn't love looking at a jovial fellow with a scary set of handsy eyebrows? Apologies for the slightly fuzzy photo, the illustration came framed, as such illustrations sometimes do, and I want to keep it that way. I kind of like the idea that this hung on someone's wall in what I assume was a place of reverence before it hung on mine...

So, what else can be said about Mr. Wolverton? Well, plenty if you read "Creeping Death From Neptune" and "Brain Bats of Venus", volumes 1 and 2 in the Life and Comics of Basil Wolverton. Both volumes are crammed with amazing Wolverton art, along with a remarkable amount of scholarship, much of it derived from Wolverton's notes and letters involving his working life.

The latest volume, "Brain Bats", is especially compelling and in many ways, quite sad. Because it is clear, from the voluminous correspondence Wolverton exchanged with various editors and publishers over years, that Basil took a lot of shit during his career. Dickering over content, money, being told that a publisher, on a whim, decided that previously acceptable Wolverton artwork was now suddenly UNacceptable... it's not so much that these things happened, but that they happened so often to this immensely talented man.

Which isn't to say that success wholly eluded him in his lifetime. His creation "Lena the Hyena", winner of a Li'l Abner "World's Ugliest Woman" comic strip contest, made the cover of Life Magazine, and later he made a decent living drawing truly horrific scenes of mayhem drawn from the Book Of Revelations for the Worldwide Church of God. (A fine hardcover collection is out of print, but available on Kindle at Amazon.) But at the same time he was doing countless caricatures of local radio station employees (!) and selling drawings like the one below for $15 to publications like "Joker" and "Humorama." They're really cool, but... imagine what Wolverton might have created with a little more wind at his back.

But we'll have to settle for what we have, which is crazy genius! And lots of it! That's good enough, at least for one Friday...