Basil Wolverton in Space

by Basil Wolverton

Genres: Comics

117 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the artwork the best. Intense inks, three-dimensional landscapes. Wolverton's imagination was unparalleled. Pre-space age sci-fi is a hoot to read--no limits! Martians everywhere! Anything is possible!

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remembered reading this several years ago and wondered if I would still enjoy it as much as I did on that first go-round.

Yeah...I did. The Spacehawk material is Wolverton at his freaky best, with the first instances of the bizarre creatures and art style that would later make him famous. And Spacehawk's casual manner of killing his opponents makes me smile. Comic strips are comic books are so chock full of heroes who won't kill a villain no matter what they do, and how much they do it, that it's nice to see a guy who just plain ends the merry-go-round. Honestly, if there are some villains out there who think of threatening the lives of me, or my friends, or the entirety of a planet, I WILL put you down. I can't see myself as one of those, "Oh ho! Well...you kidnapped and tortured me and my wife for the thirty-fifth time, Dr. Laserhead, so it's JAIL for you."

No...it's not. It's the grave. Cuz I take after my hero: Spacehawk.

The only thing that keeps this from five stars is the onset of World War II, which convinced Wolverton to move his space strips to Earth, and pit his various heroes against Japanese or German opponents. In these strips, Wolverton works within the box of these plots, and his inventiveness pays the price.

[Rick Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, I love Basil Wolverton's work. Even though this is a little earlier in his career, it's still unique and weird and awesome. A collection of strips and one-offs that he tried to sell for syndication, it's a satisfying assortment. What really gives it depth, though, are the notes, from a biographical sketch by Wolverton's son to shorter liner notes, about the runs and how they were used or not, and how during WW2 his work was bent for war propaganda, which eventually killed Spacehawk off. A really enjoyable read.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a way, comic book artist Basil Wolverton can be viewed as a kind of anti R. Crumb. Not in terms of his weltanschauung, but in purely stylistic terms. Crumb has that intricate-but-tentative crosshatching style, which achieves its surety through successive pencil and ink layers. Basil Wolverton’s style is much surer from the first stroke. He’s a little more like Bill Griffith, and some of his lumbering oafish characters even recall Bill’s master creation, Zippy the Pinhead. Wolverton’s the kind of man not only to do a crossword puzzle in ballpoint pen, but to not regret his hubris halfway through the task. In other words, he’s a master with a steady hand and a deft touch.
In Basil Wolverton in Space, we get exactly what the title promises. These are (mostly) comics that Wolverton drew and wrote for various publishers. His view of space is very much “Golden Age,” SF, with fusiform ships and vermiform aliens with segmented bodies. His square-jawed heroic lunks are boring, two-dimensional characters for the most part. His titular Spacehawk, for instance, is your typical cardboard cutout he-man who dispenses quips and punches a murderer’s row of interchangeable baddies. His Supersonic Sammy, a bulb-headed, bug-eyed wiseacre is a lot more fun. Even when Sammy’s enlisted in the obvious WW2 propaganda effort—tweaking Uncle Joe Stalin’s mustache—he remains lighthearted and irascible.
It goes without saying that the art is beautiful, with the surfaces of the various alien worlds warrened in intricate honeycombs of caverns and looming mountains. Some of the splash pages—especially the scenes of Biblical and nuclear apocalypse—deserve to be framed and hung in galleries. The characters wear looks of agonized Boschian horror, tilting their heads upward and frozen in Pompeian poses of agony. For variety, some caricatures of famous persons—done as intricately and finely as woodcuts—grace the back pages. These include: an avuncularly playful Boris Karloff, caught (or depicted) in a better humor than he most times presents onscreen; an alcoholic with a giant bristly mustache a chambermaid could use to scrub grime off stone floors; and poor Uncle Joe Stalin again, grinning maniacally as he threats to send another dissident off to the caviar mines.
An intro by Wolverton’s son and a pageful of homages to the master bookend the work nicely. Recommended.