Wallace Wood — Stripped (Part 3 Of 3)
Shattuck #26, 1972
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. This is our third (and final installment) in a week-long series focused on Wallace Wood.
Shattuck is the rarest, the oddest, and the shortest-lived of the Wood Studio strip ventures.
Many collectors had never seen any until Fanatagraphics issued a complete collection a few years ago.
From Frank Plowright on The Slings and Arrows:
“Shattuck is more a collector’s curiosity than a bona fide graphic novel, pulling together the episodes of a short lived Western newspaper strip produced in 1972 for the Overseas Weekly. Wood’s studio had the contract to produce the strip, and as with others for the same market, one of the artists recalled the brief as being to get the women’s clothes off as rapidly as possible. It can’t be said that Wood underestimated his audience…
“Many hands worked on the project… Wood himself might be involved in any episode plotting, laying out, adding inks or correcting, while his chief studio assistant Nicola Cuti also produced plots and layouts using a swipe file. Most of the actual illustration was the first published work of Howard Chaykin, then Dave Cockrum, both usually inked by Jack Abel. Both Wood and Abel have utterly distinctive inking styles, so there’s no difficulty in recognizing which worked on which strip.
This particular example appears to be mostly Cockrum, possibly with some Abel inks and definitely some Wood fixes in places. It’s “Where’s Woody” instead of “Where’s Waldo” — you have to look carefully to find it.
