I'm nuts for Basil Wolverton !

His son Monte is quite the editorial / political cartoonist in his own right as well.

I was first exposed to the Plop! covers. Possibly my first must-buy title, although I might have put Scamp comics first. No Scamp, look for a Plop!

I had a few '50s Fawcetts with single or even half pages by him. I still remember a line from one, which was "zounds, your peepers are as sound as a hound's" I had one Marvel with a single Kurtzman 'Hey Look' page and they were also memorable, but any Basil was the best surprise to find in a comic.

I like what I've seen of Spacehawk, but the Brain Bats and other nightmare based types are maybe my favorites. I had a b&w reprint comic of some sort with two or three of them. I think maybe it had a Monte Wolverton cover. It was sort of neat to find out Basil and family were from Vancouver, Washington... and Dave Cockrum was from Pendleton, Oregon. The only other brushes with comic book coolness and places is that Ken Steacy moved to my hometown and John Byrne briefly lived here too.

Those Stardust comics seem about the closest thing to Wolverton. Influenced perhaps? But really Basil Wolverton was so unique, there is nobody that come close. Kind of like George Herriman that way, I just wouldn't want to see someone else doing his creations.

Art Arteries (on the lookout for roving bands of spaghetti fanatics):

I have odd memories of discovering Wolverton. I discovered him in the notes of The Overstreet Guide rather than from his actual art. I found the very first Overstreet I ever laid eyes on in the trash heap at my high school on the last day of school my sophomore year (it was the 15th Edition with the Shazam/Captain Marvel cover)along with all the detritus thrown there as students cleaned out their lockers for the year amidst notebooks, papers, paperbacks, textbooks, etc. I took it home and spent days pouring over it. As I looked over the notes on older comics I never knew existed previously I noticed frequent references to Wolverton-a or Wolverton-c, which to be honest caught my eye because of the similarity of his name to Wolverine. I had no idea who he was or what his art looked like, but I did note that issues with his art or covers did go for a fair bit more than other issues of series around it.

On my next trip to my then LCS, The Bookie in East Hartford, CT, run by Hal Kinney an old school dealer who had emerged form sci-fi fandom, I asked him about Wolverton-I was just getting in to collecting comics seriously and he was my first collecting mentor so to speak, I learned a lot from him. His response was along the lines of one of the best sci-fi artists in comics ever and he proceeded to dig out an issue with a Spacehawk cover to show me from the stacks of comics he kept behind the counter (very few back issues were out in boxes to be browsed through, most were kept in stacks on shelves behind the counter and you had to ask for a specific title and he would bring out a stack of unbagged/unboarded comics for you to look through).

At that age, I wasn't sure what to make of Wolverton's art. It is quirky and stylistic and at the time all my opinions on comic art were framed through the lens of Perez and Starlin. It wasn't until many, many years later when I stumbled upon a reprint edition of Spacehawk published by Dark Horse that I really delved into Wolverton's art. My tastes had evolved over time and I really dug his work at that point, and I have maintained an appreciation for his stuff ever since.

-M

I felt it was consistent with the grotesque and large-scale where it could, before the sci-fi was toned down to be “less fantastic and more realistic,” but Wolverton definitely did what he could to keep the feature interesting.

I knew him first from Plop! (trivia question: what was the first DC comic to feature entirely naked characters on the covers of most of its issues?), but it was the reprint of "The Eye of Doom" in Marvel's Weird Wonder Tales that sold me on Wolverton. Somewhere later I saw "Brain Bats of Venus", essentially the same plot, and recently I saw yet another Wolverton story from the Atlas days that recycled the same story. Even with all the other stories in that issue of WWT being weak, I distinctly remember "Eye of Doom" making that issue feel well worth my 20 cents, and I remember exactly where I bought it (I know that's not so uncommon among comic book fans, but it always amazes my wife). Even in an era when his reprinted art was obviously out of sync with modern styles, I loved every cartoony, noodly ink line. I consider it genuine high Art, very worthy of gallery showing--the rendering, the imagination, but most of all, the incredible sense of design. I keep paging back up just to look again at the apocalyptic destruction in the page electricmaestro shared above. Stunning!

I own precious little Basil Wolverton, and what I do is exclusively MAD magazine stuff, I think. But he's just so great. There's a gloriously and grotesquely surreal quality to his artwork, like something from the weird type of dreams you have when you go to sleep before you've properly come down from an acid trip put on paper.

From Mystic #6, "The Eye of Doom"...

Yeah, while it seems that DC frequently dips into its oldest history of heroes, Marvel seems to barely do it at all beyond Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and the Jim Hammond Human Torch to an extent, as well as tributes like the Invaders and the Twelve, but never really full-on revivals.