Cannon – Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Wallace Wood — Stripped (Part 1 Of 3)

June 29, 2021 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Cannon, Strip #61, 1973

Happy (almost) Independence Day! Welcome to our second annual month-long celebration of the “Independents” — Independent creators and projects that continue to impact the comic book medium.

Celebrating both Comic strips AND independent artists and their creations, we present Wallace Wood… and Cannon, an action strip series that is somehow both ludicrously serious and deadly satirical at the same time.

Cannon, first appearing in Wood’s own Heroes Inc. comic book (1969), ran from 1970 to 1973 in Overseas Weekly, a newspaper produced for American servicemen.

The single best overview of the strip I have ever read comes from writer Rocko Jerome via the website Sequart. Excerpts below:

“There’s no greater proof of (Wood’s) mastery than Cannon, which feels like the perfect and most truly, thoroughly “Wallace Wood” product imaginable. In lesser hands, the material could’ve sank into seedy Tijuana Bible territory, but the work is so beautifully rendered and put together that it’s impossible to assail the craft involved. There are those who will call these drawings on paper misogynistic and gratuitously violent, and it’s hard to argue that it is not, but the tightly rendered imagination on display will tell you what you need to know. Wood could make ugly things beautiful and beautiful things gorgeous…

“The jokey animated television series Archer feels like a dumbed down, considerably less risky version of Cannon, which is several decades its senior. Cannon simply doesn’t let up on the throttle, its gloriously illustrated Id running roughshod over its pages.”

Read the entire review — it’s worth every minute of your time.

And my own, succinct review:

This is some great Wood artwork.

Wallace Wood — Indie Hero

July 25, 2020 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Heroes, Inc. #1, 1969

Welcome back to a month long celebration of the “Independents” — Independent creators and projects that continue to impact the comic book medium.

I recently noticed a fellow professional declare Wallace Wood the greatest comic book illustrator of all time.

Unlike most commentary on social media these days, as far as I can tell, no one jumped up and bashed him. Sure you can disagree, or have another personal favorite (Kirby, Williamson, et al) but you end up in the weeds of arguing whether Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb was the greatest baseball player ever.

If Wood isn’t the “best,” he’s still in the top few.

Wood was also a pioneer in the independent comics world, trying new things at a time when he was frustrated with the mainstream commercial publishers.

In fact, shortly after the cancellation of T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents, Wood created an interesting series of “adult” oriented characters, primarily for the armed forces.

Heroes Inc. features the only color version of any of these characters, and introduces the Misfits, self-explanatory name and all.

This comic was “rare” for a while in the 70s, but then someone discovered a warehouse find.

And then another.

Pretty soon, there were likely more than 100,000 copies floating around. It appears that 250K were printed and most were never actually distributed.

I sure hope Woody didn’t get stuck with any of that printing bill.