Vanguard's Wally Wood books The Wally Wood Sketchbook (2000)(compiled by J. David Spurlock & Bill Pearson) Most of the works here are rough and loose. A lot of pencil pieces. But what Wood is trying to communicate is coming in loud and clear. 10.5 by 6.5 inches - 112 pages, with 30 examples of large reproductions of that work falling anywhere along the 'finished' scale, and another 40-odd pages gathering together two-or-more images. The text is a Bruce Timm introduction, an informative biography by Jim Steranko, and interviews with Joe Orlando, Al Williamson and Wally Wood himself. Some pages are lost to a display of sequential art, character-sheets, black-&-white reproductions of color works, and ten large images turned sideways. Neither of the examples that spread over the gutter do so successfully. Some might be interested to know that 26 of the gathered sketches are concept work-ups for the MARS ATTACKS card series, some of them having been left on 'the cutting room floor'. A plethora of represented genres: commercial, superhero, science-fiction, fantasy, espionage, horror, historical, figure-studies, comedy and a little bit of sketched nudity. Most everything is captioned with the creation year and what usage the preliminaries were in service of (many projects not coming to fruition at all). Among the 'well-presented' art are large pieces by Bruce Timm, Frank Frazetta* and Al Williamson. * - Note that Frazetta's 'well-presented' piece here is presented better in his own collections on The List. Strange Worlds Of Science Fiction [-BELOW THE LINE-] (2011) This is a collection of 1950s comic-book sci-fi stories illustrated by Wally Wood. I would say the periodicals they were extracted from are obscure, but the stories are interspaced with examples of Wood's art from the better-known EC titles. You get 199 pages of sequential art along with an afterthought-ish color 'cover gallery', so you do get a handful of pages with multiple images and another handful of full-page, 'well-presented' covers. Other Vanguard releases Vanguard's Frank Brunner collections RGK - The Art Of Roy G. Krenkel The Paintings Of J. Allen St. John - Grand Master Of Fantasy The Fantastic Art Of Arthur Suydam Spies, Vixens, And Masters Of Kung Fu - The Art Of Paul Gulacy The Alluring Art Of Margaret Brundage Echoes - The Drawings Of Michael William Kaluta The Amazing World Of Carmine Infantino [BELOW THE LINE] SEND US A COMMENT (goes via e-mail - all info kept anonymous, but comment itself may be shared . . .) |