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.
