“WALLY WOOD’S MEN“ A COLUMN ABOUT EC COMICS, PART 2

What does a real man look like? And how does a real man act? If you asked this question in the early 1950’s, you only needed to take a look at the most bankable Hollywood stars. In 1951, Humphrey Bogart had a hit movie. And so, had John Wayne. Bogart was a bit past his prime, and having hit his early fifties, in “African Queen”“, he was well beyond portraying a cool private eye who never seemed to take off his hat or his trench coat. Instead he was cast as a curmudgeon. But his rough-and-ready, somewhat greasy Charlie Allnut, a mechanic who piloted an old steamboat, was still charming to boot. What man his age would not be able to identify with such a cantankerous guy who ultimately had a heart of gold and who even let Kathrine Hepburn“s character Rose navigate the boat while he took care of the engine, knowing full well that she was in over her head. John Wayne, nearly a decade younger, was in full hero mode. If you wanted to cast a stoic cowboy or a commanding officer during war times who did not mince words, the Duke knew how to deliver. If you preferred the quiet gentleman-type, impossibly handsome actor Gregory Peck fit the bill. And audiences clearly agreed, since Peck had not one, but three massive hits at the box office for that year. And if you were a girl and you wanted to dream about a type of guy you could introduce your parents to, there was Montgomery Clift who burnt up the silver screen with a new type of acting style when romancing a stunningly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor. She wouldn“t take her violet eyes off his pretty face that emoted all the sensitivity a girl could ever want in a guy who had this unique presence that told you that he would care for you. But if you wanted a pure alpha male, there was only one man who was the entire package, in more ways than one, a guy who made the other guys look old, and Clift, who was just four years younger, look a bit effete by comparison. A guy needed to be able to rock a white t-shirt, but a real man needed to be of sinew and muscle, of raw, assured masculinity. His manliness very much oozed out from every pore while he moved like a jungle cat, fast, fierce and with a sense of danger and purpose, that such a man wouldn“t only garner respect, but that other man, who were lesser men by default, either wanted to be his friend or they feared him. And in 1951 there was only one actor who could scream the words “I“m the King Around Here!”“ while only seconds prior he“d been licking dinner off his fingers like some prehistoric hunter who was seated at an open fire and who had slain the beast that had served as this evening“s supper all by himself. As for Hollywood, there was only one actor who made it all work and who made it look easy, and most of all, made it look real. And in a sense, it was real. It was as real as the young war veteran who put this type of man on paper when he gave a visual representation to the perfect romantic hero in a science fiction tale, and when he gave a face to those men who did not run, but moved forward on Omaha Beach or when defending the 38th parallel. Like Marlon Brando, who took what was true on the inside, genuine emotion that came from experience, and put it on the outside, master artist Wallace Wood externalized romanticized ideals and likewise the horrors of war onto the page which lay before him. He did it while drawing characters like Sergeant Purvis who made men out of grunts during basic training and molded them into the right kind of material for the 805th Parachute Infantry Regiment, so that these young recruits were not only well-versed in the art of killing enemy troops, but had the mettle to keep going when the going got tough. It is not difficult to be a hero when things are easy, but those under Sergeant Purvis purview had a specific task. With allied troops moving in from the Atlantic to storm the Cherbourg Peninsula, the paratroopers needed to provide crucial support behind the lines in occupied France. Like the actor, Wood took what were emotions that were rooted in real-life observations for his art. Like many able-bodied men, Wally had enlisted, and he“d served his country first in the Merchant Marine and then, in the U.S. Paratroops. Even later, the war years stayed with him. There is a photograph of him from 1980 which shows him as one hell of a defiant guy. A smoke tugged into one corner of his mouth, he wears an army jacket that is adorned with a few pin-badge buttons and a service patch. His gray hair is cut short, his skin is leathery, and he brandishes a replica of Thompson semi-automatic submachine gun. Of course, Sergeant Purvis was a fictional character. Purvis lived in the pages of a story that appeared in a comic book series called Two-Fisted Tales, in issue No. 20 to be exact, published early in 1951. This series had just started a few months earlier, and oddly enough with issue No. 18, though it wasn“t anything special that a comic book series would have its start not with a No. 1 for its first issue in the 50s, especially not with this publisher. EC Comics, which originally had stood for Educational Comics, then, with a small handful of books only, for the much more marketing-friendly Entertaining Comics, was now fully in the entertaining business. Due to this and ever-changing trends and reader appetites, a series might get re-named after just a few issues. However this was only half of the story with Two-Fisted Tales which came out when publisher Bill Gaines and his editor Al Feldstein were still finding their feet, after Gaines had inherited the comic book company from his late father Max. Due to some miscommunications with wholesalers, Bill Gaines had received word that his new series The Haunt of Fear was a bust. He and Feldstein had just banked the fortunes of the fledgling company on a new emerging trend, horror comics. It was another attempt of theirs at creating a successful anthology horror comic series, after Tales from the Crypt. Competitor Avon had put out a horror one-shot to test the demand, and American Comics Group had been able to establish a full-fledged series centered around the supernatural and the macabre with Adventures Into The Unknown as early as 1948. The Haunt of Fear had taken its numbering from a Western Comic and before that, a Funny Book. In order to provide his new title, Two-Fisted Tales, with a pedigree by making it appear as if this new offering was an already established series, Gaines decided to use the numbering from the cancelled The Haunt of Fear series. If this was not confusing enough, imagine Gaines“ surprise when he found out that the horror book was indeed selling. Thus, Bill uncancelled this series after he“d already printed the first issue of the other title, and both titles came out with a No. 18 issue, Two-Fisted Combat as its very first issue, The Haunt of Fear as just another book, without readers noticing a thing. The idea for this new series that offered a world of conflict in which men took center stage (even though female characters did appear, but far less than in the other new titles), came from an artist who“d joined the company in the previous year. His name was Harvey Kurtzman. As for his motivation, Kurtzman had this to say: “Nobody had done anything on the depressing aspects of war”¦ logic led me to research actual war and tell kids what was true about war.”“ While it is next to impossible to say if kids read these issues initially or if their older brothers and their fathers bought them, men who had experienced war, Kurtzman and EC Comics had a hit on their hands. Right at the same time when the fifth issue of Two-Fisted Tale hit newsstand, there was a second war title from EC Comics, also under the stewardship of Kurtzman who not only wrote every story but provided his artists with complete layouts. If you consider the lead-time on a comic book, the production on the first issue of Frontline Combat had to have started right around the time the sales number from the second issue of the first series made it back to Gaines. Even more astonishing is the fact that writer-artist-editor Kurtzman still found the time to start a third comic series near the end of the next year, this time a humor and satire book called MAD. To say that Harvey was on a roll is most certainly an understatement. Though Kurtzman was incredibly gifted as an artist himself, with a very unique style, not only did time constraints make it prohibitive for him to pencil and ink every one of the four stories per issue himself, he was also savvy enough to realize that certain stories required the talents of different artists whose own styles fitted perfectly to what type of tale he had in mind at any given time. Like Al Feldstein on every other book EC put out, and later Johnny Craig on The Vault of Horror, Harvey was like a showrunner on a modern television (or streaming) series. He set the direction, communicated his vision and hand-picked a director for each episode. Though he had a number of highly accomplished artists working on his war titles, chief among them Jack Davis or John Severin, arguably, to this day Wally Wood remains the one artist mostly associated with these war tales.

In Wally Wood, the man who had “come to open the purple testament of bleeding war”“ at EC Comics, found his perfect collaborator where men were concerned who always looked their heroic best. But, as we can gather from statements he made about him, Kurtzman considered Wally a hero in his own right. Kurtzman would use words like “Intensity”“ and “self-sacrifice”“ when describing how Wood would tackle his scripts, words that immediately conjure up images of combat and acts of selfless heroism. You can almost smell the rounds fired from an automatic rifle, taste the blood and sweat in your mouth as your lips are burning from heat, thirst and the tobacco from filter-less cigarettes. Indeed, Wood had clawed his way into the comics industry. Before he enlisted when he was still underage, Wood had already had many jobs under his belt. He worked the odd job during the nightshift at a factory, he was a busboy as well as a pin boy in a bowling alley, cleaning tables and setting up the bowling pins. He moonlighted as truck loader and as dental lab assistant. And like his father, he did a stint as a lumberjack. Upon getting his discharge from the Army, he enrolled for a semester at the Minneapolis School of art in 1947. Once he had moved to New York City, he likewise attended a semester at the Burne Hogarth“s Cartoonist and Illustrators School on the G.I. Bill in 1948. Unable to get any art assignments with comic publisher, even though there was always a high demand for any guy who could hold a pencil in the right way, it was the self-proclaimed “King of Comics”“ Victor Fox, a progenitor of highly salacious material, who hired Wood via an agent named Rinaldo Epworth. Not convinced of the young man“s artistic skills though, all Wally got to do was to work as a letterer on whatever romance comics Victor was peddling in a given months. Though he was eventually upgraded to doing fill-in work for backgrounds, Wood finally lucked out when he met fellow artist John Severin who introduced him to comics“ legend Will Eisner who had him work on backgrounds as well, but for his massively successful newspaper feature The Spirit. It was Victor Fox however, who let Wood do this first pencil and ink comic story in Women Outlaws No. 7 in 1949. With some industry contacts of his own now, Wood got together with Harry Harrison, Joe Orlando and Sidney Check to share a studio in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Wood worked and studied other artists, also those who moved in and out of their studio like Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel. In a way, this was already almost half of Bill Gaines bullpen from the early 1950s, but Wood was not there yet. He had to cut some dead weight loose first. He and Harrison had formed a duo, and this was how they presented themselves to Gaines who was in the market for new talent. Harrison, who many years later would hit it big as a science fiction novelist, was a talker. He did the pencils while Wally was once again relegated to doing backgrounds and inks. But it was then, that Wood spent night after night at the drawing board to study and re-draw the works of men like Joe Kubert and Frank Frazetta, the latter who was a prodigy. Legend had it that when Frazetta“s mother had brought her son to a teacher at a prestigious art school, the teacher had taken one look at the boy“s portfolio only to attest that there was nothing he would be able to teach him that young Frank not already did better. Frazetta was six years old. He was no Frank, but it quickly dawned on Wood that he was selling himself short. He and Harrison got to do a werewolf story in the very first issue of The Vault of Horror. In fact, it was No. 12 from April 1950. Gaines had just decided to discontinue Crime Patrol. And like he had rebranded Gunfighter into The Haunt of Fear, from now on, the covers for this erstwhile imitation of Lev Gleason“s Crime Does No Pay, would let every kid know right away that this was no longer a series about cops and robbers, but more of that creepy stuff their mothers didn“t want them to read. Though “The Werewolf Legend”“ from a script by Gardner Fox and Harrison calls for some moody scenes and Harrison and Wood deliver, it is a serviceable product at best, and at worst it has Wood adhering so closely to Harrison“s uninspired pencils that the visuals suffer for it. He knew he could do better. Wood knew that he needed a collaborator who better meshed with his own sensibilities, to improve his style, gain confidence and ultimately become an artist with a unique voice. It was unavoidable it seems that he and Harrison would have a bitter falling out in the same year.

Like many people will, once they“ve untangled themselves from a loop-sided relationship, Wood began playing the field, meaning in his case that he was working for other publishers while he hooked up with a new partner who was already in the picture while his team-up with Harrison still lasted. His name was Joe Orlando, and while Joe and Wood eventually became two of the artists who are widely associated with EC Comics and what Gaines and his editor Al Feldstein cleverly marketed as a “New Trend”“, Wood and Orlando launched a short-lived science fiction book for Avon at the end of 1951 which would clearly betray their respective growth as visual storytellers and as master craftsmen. And once they were fully ensconced at EC in 1952, the artists only went from strength to strength, further building on what they had learned from each other while each of them was developing his own voice. Looking at the opening page which introduced readers to the attractive main characters, this multi-panel black and white page offers further testament to Wood“s artistic progress once he had cut Harry Harrison loose. Though it is unknown who wrote the captions on the opening page, these already create lots of excitement just on their own in the minds of young readers: “Meet The Avenger and Teena. Interplanetary crime fighters! In everyday life they are wealthy young aristocrat, Rod Hathway and his lovely secretary, Dot Keey, but when a band of space pirates led by Maag, a Martian renegade, threatens the big space”¦ Rod swings into action in his secret identity as The Space Detective!”“ Now, Rod was one of those handsome, blonde and mostly dull heroes one found in other books, only much better rendered, but Teena was unlike any female character readers had seen before. Though being cast in a subservient role, that of a secretary, and with the balance of power further tipped in Rod“s favor due to his station in life, the full figure shot of the young blonde offered by Orlando and Wood, with her head turned in profile while her body faced front, told a different story. Teena had a most confident look on her pretty face that made her seem a bit aloof while at the same time her eyes rested less on the hero but on the blaster, he cocked with one hand, a ray-gun which came with an unusually thick barrel. Wearing an Alice band that held her perfect hair back, Teena sported tight leggings and a top that simultaneously revealed much of her ample bust while it also left her midriff including her navel bare. The message must have been quite puzzling to any younger reader while older kids instinctively got what was going on. Teena was not impressed by Rod“s money or his social standing, or his fairly standard good looks. What interested her was if he was able to deliver the goods, so speak. Anyway, things had become much more complicated than in one of EC“s war titles. And the sexually charged imagery only grew in intensity from panel to panel as the two artists offered sneak peaks of what readers could expect from the issue, namely more of this strangely exciting stuff. And so, it was. Interestingly, Wood and Orlando and writer Walter Gibson (most famous for being the main writer of The Shadow pulp series in the 1930s and 1940s), delivered something that was fairly unusual for this time: the artists and the writer supplied not one, but three tales just in the debut issue. Though the quality of the art is not consistent throughout these three tales and not even from page to page, these were not yet fully-formed artists and the lead time must surely have played a role with such a high page count comparatively speaking, all the hallmarks of the pairs later work is on display. Heroes, beautiful women in either nigh impractical outfits or exotic attire, which made the most of their highly sexualized bodies, and scientific looking machinery that gave the impression that it could actually work. But unlike what was to come in many of his later stories across different genres for EC Comics, mainly in the tales that came from ideas by Gaines and a script by Feldstein (written on the art board), Rod and Teena had a balanced, collaborative if platonic relationship. She was his secretary in name only. Though the artists supplied not more than the cover and the black and white teaser page for the following issue, this carried through. With reversed roles (Wood provided the pencils for what little the pair contributed to the follow-up issue, with Orlando inking), the cover showed The Avenger and an even more attractive Teena as they were going up against some gigantic aliens. Instead of recoiling with raw terror from the green-hued creatures like many of her contemporaries were wont to do on the covers of similar titles, the young blonde packed a blaster of her own, and she was not afraid to unleash its deadly yellow rays with lethal force. And once readers turned to the preview page, similar images emerged. Teena packed some serious heat when she and the blonde aristocrat turned space hero fought renegade robots and gorgeous Bat-Women with leathery wings who were clad in skintight, black catsuits. There was even a panel in which the pair was auctioned off as slaves with Teena and the blonde hero nearly nude and in heavy chains. The Space Detective was ripped with muscles and one could assume, and with just a piece of cloth covering up his private parts, that the name Rod seemed aptly chosen. This is an amazing page in that it also offers a look into the future in more ways than one. Starting in 1971, Wood would produce a black and white comic strip which appeared every week for two and a half years in Overseas Weekly, a publication that was only available at a PAX of a military installation abroad. With Wood“s CANNON, troops who were stationed around the globe saw a visual continuation of this kind of material, but this time with a more mature and political bent. As for The Space Detective, the series got cancelled just a few months later. Once readers had seen what Wood and Orlando could do, it wasn“t the same without them. Interestingly, Teena quickly fell into the role of a damsel in distress once they had left the series. But all of this gender equality happened under the guise of a science fiction narrative, meaning that any bold attempts at gender equality were ways off, something that may come true only in a distant future. Wally stayed on with EC Comics, and other than working on a few horror and crime stories and later on the “preachies”“ in Shock SuspenStories, outside of his science fiction work, which he and Harrison had convinced Gaines to do in the first place, he left his mark on those war stories Harvey Kurtzman wrote, and those tales were looking towards the past, to the Roman Empire, the Battle of Agincourt, the Civil War of the 1860s, and of course, The Second World War. Though Kurtzman most certainly did not shy away from also doing stories about the then still ongoing Korean War, maybe some of his best material, this still happened with a distinct voice of the past. He was a storyteller, not a journalist, but a historian.

But what about Kurtzman himself? What type of man was the creator and showrunner of these books? If you were a boy reading these books or perhaps even an enlisted man, it seems highly likely that what came to mind was the image of a man who was stoic and confident in nature, who spoke little and only if had something profound to say. A man who would take care of business without talking about it with so many words. In short, a man who acted and most of all who looked like those men rendered by Wally Wood. And if you knew just a few details about Harvey, they only seemed to confirm this mental image some readers may very well had formed in their heads. Three years older than Wood, Harvey served in the military as well during the war. And when he was discharged, not only had he been able to sell some of the cartoons he did to a number of publishers, but when he saw a pretty girl who worked as proof-reader for one of those places, he had no problem to sweep her off her feet, and she quickly agreed to marry him. The couple had a daughter now, Meredith, and they lived in uptown Manhattan. And when he did not work on his two books for Gaines, he had some cool hobbies, too. Photography, not a nerdy thing if you considered the men from Magnum like Frank Capra who went where the action was. Harvey also liked to work on his car. With that, you certainly imagined a guy who drove to a cabin in the woods on weekends, who hunted and fished and took pictures of nature and wildlife, maybe of a grizzly even. A guy who knew how to grow a beard and who wore a flannel shirt before that was cool. A guy who could handle himself far away from any civilization. In short, a guy who looked like the protagonist of a story Wally Wood was to illustrate for Shock SuspenStories called “Came The Dawn!”“ But had you come to 225 Lafayette Street in New York, the home of EC Comics, not only would you have learned that Bill Gaines had spent more time in the Army than Harvey had, in fact the publisher served for four years in the Army Air Corps, but you would have most likely walked past Harvey at the elevator banks. Here was a thin guy with the face of a horse and a receding hairline, and in his gray suit you had simply mistaken him for an insurance salesman. Most certainly not what Wood“s heroes looked like, or a real man“s man who hung with the guys and was good at manly stuff and at getting the girl he wanted. Kurtzman looked like a nerd who was destined to remain in the friend zone. Well, in that respect, Harvey had scored. But what about his military record and his first-hand experience of men in combat situations? EC published a short artist bio on an infrequent basis. Those one-pagers, which came with a black and white picture, appeared on the reverse side of a cover from a series the respective artist was associated with the most. The one for Kurtzman reads like whoever wrote the piece, was throwing a little shade at him where his military service and his manliness were concerned: “When the war came, Harvey went”¦ into the army, that is! He was in the Engineers in Louisiana, the Infantry in Texas, and the Artillery in North Carolina. He also worked on training aids for the Information-Education Division in North Carolina.”“ Other than many of his male contemporaries including Wally Wood, Kurtzman had not enlisted, but he got drafted. And he was never sent overseas. Wood, on the other hand, did not only volunteer, but he managed to do so when he was underage. But that was late in 1944, and while Wally Wood served in the Merchant Marine and he was on tours to the Philippines, Guam, South America and Italy, he was not involved in any combat situations. Wood switched to the U.S. Army eventually, to become paratrooper with the 11th Airborne Division, but he did so once the war had ended. Wood, who was born in the same year as Steve Ditko, was too young for a more active role, with half of his time of service spent in a defeated country that was now occupied by allied forces. In Ditko“s case Germany, and in Wood“s case, Hokkaido, a small island in the South Pacific which belonged to Japan. And that picture of him holding that replica of a tommy gun like a boss? That was a gesture of defiance and a big FU to the world and the industry in which he had worked for many years. By then he was experiencing vision problems in his left eye. He had suffered a number of small strokes and as far as his career went, he had left comics behind. In fact, in 1978, after moving from New York to Connecticut and then to Los Angeles, California, he had released a self-financed record album called “Wally Wood Sings”“. When his kidneys began to fail as consequence of many years of heavy drinking and from spending endless hours at the drawing table, he could not go on with having to face the prospect of dialysis and needing a transplant, which might not be granted to him in the foreseeable future due to his alcoholism. On Halloween night of 1981, at the relatively young age of fifty-four, Wally Wood killed himself by gunshot. And though he was not a war hero, he was not only a hero of the comic book industry, but he left one hell of a legacy behind, during a career in which he“d also helped to pioneer independent comics with his magazine Witzend. But his art influenced many other artists as well, artists who were kids when they saw his work for the very first time either during the time when it was published, or in one of the numerous reprints of the EC titles and his other works.

They did not belong to those troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, men of the ground infantry of the Army who had bullets from German machine guns flying at them. And they weren“t among those marines who knew how to handle a flamethrower and who used this equipment of terror to singe jungle vegetation, enemy material and flesh alike. But still, the stories Kurtzman and Wood created together were real, and in no small part this had a lot to do with how different the men were from each other in how they approached their subjects. When Kurtzman had said that he wanted to do war tales, for him this meant that he would painstakingly gather all the information he needed for a particular story, and then shape the narrative in a way that brought the essence to the forefront. Whereas Brando used raw, genuine and comparable experiences and emotions to build his characters from the insight out, like he was taught by his teacher Stella Adler, Harvey Kurtzman started with the external. He was a researcher. When Kurtzman crafted a story involving the Merchant Marine based on Wood“s suggestion, he did not press Wood for any specifics, instead he went ahead and wrote a story about an event Wood had heard a lot of stories about. This was not something Wally had lived through, and Kurtzman could have written about something that Wood did experience instead, but it never occurred to him. This was not the kind of realism Kurtzman was going for. These were no first-hand accounts or tale tales passed around by a group of veterans after many years had passed in an attempt to make sense of it all, to find meaning in the meaningless, in the random and the cruel. The early 50s were also a time when men who had been in combat situations, didn“t like to share their experiences with outsiders. This was also a time when a man could not admit to having been afraid. This was a time of a silent generation of men, some of which would find it hard to interact with their spouse or their kids. But when Wood, and also Kurtzman as an artist, put words into drawings that would go with the captions and the dialogue, something happened. If you were one of those who mistook Harvey Kurtzman for an insurance salesman, you were certainly surprised to learn that this man who looked like a square, one who was a milquetoast and a candy-ass at that, had the FBI open a file on him. In fact, some of J. Edgar Hoover“s men at the Federal Bureau of Investigation were secretly reading Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat to find out if some of these books intended for kids might have any negative effects on the morale of soldiers, in case their fathers or older brothers had a peek at these stories as well, whether this constituted grounds for a charge of sedition. A memo, apparently from the office of J. Edgar Hoover himself, named Kurtzman, Gaines and artist Jack Davis as well as those two series. The file was closed in 1953. But still, there was something subversive going on when Kurtzman and company brought his scripts to life. The realism of these stories seemed to come rather from within than from what Kurtzman“s research had yielded him. These were not tales about heroism as it was commonly defined. These were tales in which the silence of the men who had lived through it all was all-encompassing. If for example, you looked at brawny Sergeant Purvis, the previously mentioned drill instructor, Stanley Kubrick“s movie “Full Metal Jacket”“ immediately came to mind. Though “Devils In Baggy Pants!”“ from Two-Fisted Tales No. 20 (1951) is not told from the point of view of another soldier who witnesses the abuse another private receives from his Gunnery Sergeant, but from the perspective of the sergeant himself, both start very similarly. Whereas in the Kubrick film, it is the sergeant who nicknames Private Leonard Lawrence “Gomer Pyle”“ (after the character from The Andy Griffith Show who was spun off onto his own show Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) to indicate that he has the same situation on his hands like when the naïve, eccentric and slow TV character had joined up, he does so to denigrate and isolate Lawrence. However, TV“s Pyle“s character traits are coded as gay, and this was what the sergeant suggested about Lawrence towards his comrades. He was implying that here was a guy you could pick on, you should pick on, because he did not belong in the Marine Corps. In the story by Kurtzman and Wood, Sergeant Purvis gleefully tells readers that it was the outfit that had given a young recruit named Albert Smith his nickname “Duck-Butt”“ to reflect his cowardice. That Wood gives Smith an effete, feminine look with facial features that nigh make him appear as if he were a pretty girl, only adds to the subtext Kurtzman is going for. Since Albert looks soft, he must be a coward. And since he was a coward who looked like a girl this gave the sergeant the more reason to pick on him and to let the other men know that they had somebody among them who did not belong with the paratroopers. It is not surprising that themes like gender fluidity and the calling into question of gender identity were very much on the minds of not only these two creators but also those of many men during these times, and especially in male dominated environment such as the Army. And with masculinity under attack it seemed, this wouldn“t be the only tale among Wood“s EC work that tackled this subject. The movie and the comic play out very differently, though. Whereas in the Kubrick film, Private Leonard can“t take the constant harassment any longer and he first kills his drill instructor Sergeant Hartman and then himself, in the Kurtzman and Wood story, Albert“s infantry regiment is called up before anyone gets physically hurt, though not for Sergeant Purvis“ lack of trying. Once the men take heavy fire over France and are pin pointed at a strategically important bridge, their assignment turns into a suicide mission. Those who have survived the initial mauling by German machine guns, know they will have to blow up the bridge, lest the enemy is able to move their armored vehicles to the beach which is getting invaded by the allies at the same time. But by doing so, they have no way to withdraw. And after another attack, there is no one left but Purvis, Albert and one more man. It“s their lives against all those lives of their comrades on the beach. While the other guy sets the charges on the bridge and Albert keeps the German infantry at bay who is moving in on them, Purvis quickly makes a beeline across the bridge and to safety while it is Albert who valiantly holds the Germans back until the bridge is blown to pieces, at the cost of his own life. Purvis, who is telling this story to troops who have found him, is clearly shell-shocked, but it is also the moment of truth for him: “Pvt. Albert Smith was dead! ”˜Cowardly“ Duck-Butt Smith was dead. And where was the brave tough Sergeant Purvis when the fire-works broke out? There was though Sergeant Purvis! Cowering in a ditch! Left Duck-Butt to die at the gun, and ran to the rear to hide in a ditch! Big-mouthed Sergeant Purvis!”“ And whereas Albert Smith had been introduced with a soft look on his near innocent-looking, tender face, the story ended with a close-up shot of Sergeant Purvis“ haggard visage, a gaunt and emaciated grimace that betrayed that saving his own skin, had come for him with the price of a loss of his manhood. Not only had he run from enemy fire, but a young private who he had picked as a coward (and as a homosexual) had not. And still, there was nothing heroic about Albert“s sacrifice either. He was but one more dead soldier. But maybe he was the lucky one when compared to the main character from another Kurtzman and Wood story, one which introduced readers to a new expression.

Though Kurtzman had never been abroad to fight in The Second World War, he instinctively understood the many horrors that came with war. Not only physical injuries, but also, and maybe especially, those inflicted on the minds of the men. What today is called PTSD for short or post-traumatic stress disorder, had many names during many wars. There was battle fatigue, then there was shell-shocked, and many more terms were used to describe the same phenomenon of men (and women) who seemed alright on the outside and who would act completely normal until they were brought back to an traumatic event by such a simple thing as some other guy using the horn of his car. Once the war in Korea had begun, which also involved American troops, the expression “to bug out”“ was quickly popularized by these very soldiers. To bug out means to retreat hastily. It can also mean to flee as quickly as you can without any pre-existing plan. But Kurtzman not only brought this phrasal verb into the vernacular of kids who acted out war scenarios with their plastic rifles and a group of other children from the neighborhood, but he gave it an additional layer of meaning. In “Bug Out!!”“ from Two-Fisted Combat No. 24 (1951) Kurtzman and Wood tell the story of a soldier named Valentine who is on tour in Korea. While his patrol had been able to avoid small-arms fire during most of the day, when they get shelled with mortar fire, they have no choice but to leave their position, to bug out. Any territory they had gained during their campaign is lost as the troops are now on their long way back. Matters get worse since not only do they run out of food, but they get attacked during the night by enemy soldiers. This is when Valentine bugs out again. He runs as fast as he can without looking back. Still during the same night, he makes it to an abandoned village where he falls asleep among the few heavily shelled walls that offer shelter to him. At daylight, when he comes to, he finds that he is no longer alone. On the other side of the wall he observers some Korean soldiers who have settled down for breakfast. The four men are at ease and they stand around a warming fire with their guns leaned against the wall. From the other side, Valentine can almost touch the sub-machine guns which look a lot like the tommy gun Wood would hold in the picture from 1980. But Valentine“s mind is not on the guns which are so close. His needs are much more basic than to now reach for an instrument that brings death. It is the rice the men steam that has his attention. Valentine is intent on surviving, and to obtain sustenance takes precedence over everything else. It is the sight of the rice and his hunger that motivates him into taking the lives of the four combatants first by reaching for one of the machine guns and then by unloading on them until the last bullet: “I was like an animal fighting for brute survival! I had to have that rice! In a fury of hate and fear, I pulled the trigger!”“ While he feeds, like “a hungry, wild-eyed dog”“, even scooping up food from the dirty ground, he is almost too late in realizing that there are bomber planes in the air above him, American planes. Two planes drop their bombs on the destroyed village, which is redundant, while here was one of their heroic comrades who further regressed into the state of a primitive animal: “I hugged the ground! I pressed against the ground! I tried to claw into the ground! An animal! A miserable wretched animal trying to crawl down into the ground!”“ Valentine“s eyes are bugged out with fear while he wonders: “What happened to me? What happened to all my fine civilized instincts?”“ It is with this panel that the story cuts to a hospital. It is a year later, and Valentine is in a wheelchair while a young nurse talks to him as she moves his chair closer to one of the windows assuming that this must be something he will enjoy. When another nurse joins her, the women discuss his case with Valentine closer to the window. As the first nurse explains: “Not a scratch on him! Yet he hasn“t said a word since he was found! Just stares out of the window!”“ It is not like the blonde soldier is unable to hear the conversation, but he chooses not to interact. It is the other nurse who judges him based on his appearance: “He looks like such a sensitive, gentle boy!”“ But Valentine has found out what he is: “I“m a killer! I“m an animal”¦ running through the dark with my tail between my legs! Growling around and killing for food! Hiding in the cracks between rocks!”“ That was what he was doing now. With this story, Kurtzman and Wood showed readers that “bug out”“ could also mean that you might “bug out”“ from life itself, that you became a shut-in, and stopped interacting with other human beings whenever the pain and the shame became too heavy. It was what war yielded you. Wood“s men looked like what heroes are supposed to look like, but there was nothing heroic in sacrifice. If you read Kurtzman“s words about Wood“s work ethics and about his “sacrifice”“ in the context in which he said and meant them, an image emerges that is devoid of any machismo and male bravado: “Wally devoted himself so intensely to his work that he burned himself out. He overworked his body”¦ he had that quality of frustration and tension”¦ I think it ate away his insides and the work really used him up.”“

But Wally Wood didn“t only work for Harvey Kurtzman during his years at EC Comics, which came before the New Trend line and lasted a few years until Gaines“ later publishing attempt called “New Direction”“. The artist delivered some of his best work when he was working from scripts by Al Feldstein (which had been “spring boarded”“ by Gaines). Like Kurtzman, Feldstein tailored the tales he gave Wood to illustrate right to his sensibilities and strengths. For example, working for Al Feldstein gave Wally the opportunity to draw highly sophisticated, beautiful looking machinery. As author and EC specialist Grant Geissman observes in his book “Foul Play”“, he “essentially created a new visual vocabulary for science fiction art.”“ However, like with his collaboration with Orlando and Walter Gibson on Avon“s Space Detective No. 1, the contrast between Wally Wood“s war comics and his other work at EC Comics could not have been any more jarring. While the former existed in a world (mostly) without women, his work on horror and science fiction titles wasn“t only a world of men and women, but of a terror that came from unexpected places. Men in a combat zone constantly braced themselves for the worst, but they knew their enemy. Characters who walked across alien landscapes or the seemingly familiar trappings of a suburban home were trepidatious because they did not. Their horror had no face they knew, it was subtle and deviant in nature. Readers noticed another contrast though. Wood“s men in the war stories had always been of a handsome bent, but having learned from Joe Orlando on Space Detective, his women were now drop-dead gorgeous sex-goddesses. And among the many anxieties men faced once they“d come home from the war, there was the knowledge that it all could go away in the next second, that life itself was but a very fleeting affair. With the bomb and the fear of nuclear holocaust ever present, this only brought an even greater trepidation into the living rooms suburban homes. Transformations, caused by an outside force, could happen unseen at first and then might reveal themselves as if they had occurred overnight. There are in fact two results of such a transformation present in the Feldstein and Wood story that any interested reader found in Tales from the Crypt No. 25 (1951). The title character of “Judy, You“re Not Yourself Today!”“ represents the first woman in an EC comic by Wood that looks noticeably different to his earlier efforts. The tale appeared right between the first and the second issue of The Space Detective and the visual similarities between Teena and Judy are very obvious. However, this was not a tale about a young woman asserting herself by claiming a position of power and equality, like Teena had when she checked out her companion“s virility while picking up a blaster herself. That the blonde Teena was on such an equal footing with the equally blonde Avenger was a frightening prospect for some men indeed, a form of transformation (and liberation) in women Gaines and Feldstein would explore further down the line. Judy Abelson though was like one of those women Wood was drawing right around the same time for another Avon publication, namely for the revival of Eerie. Once a one-shot in 1947, in 1951 the title got a series order. It had not escaped other comic companies what EC Comics was doing. After Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein had tested the waters with a horror story each in Crime Patrol and War Against Crime, with positive feedback from readers for these tales, they had quickly rebranded the former title as The Crypt of Terror in 1950, and then finally after three issues as Tales from the Crypt. Avon wanted in on the action and they had Wood working for them. But not for long. He did however provide a story in the second issue and did covers for issues two to four. The women on these covers were all victims. Either they were in chains or they were running from some monster. The cover for issue No. 3 though, is of particular interest since the blonde woman who recoils from green-hued beast with bared fangs is another dead ringer for Judy. All in all, Eerie did feature some of the most notorious “headlight”“ covers this side of Al Feldstein in the possibly most exploitative and lazy manner. A figure drawing of a female by Sid Check was re-purposed for another cover and then once again when traced by a different artist. However, like he had done for Space Detective, Wood provided three fantastic preview pages, again in black and white. Since these pages had no distinct panel borders delineating the different scenes from one another, Wood makes the most of it and he gives the proceedings a surreal, proto-psychedelic feel which makes the influence his artwork had on artists like Jim Steranko decades later even more obvious. When compared to what was offered in the Eerie series across the board, this EC story stands head and shoulder above all of it. This is due to Feldstein“s tight and engaging script, but to a larger degree to the maturity of Wood“s artwork. This was one of the transformations, and readers commented on it in the letters page. Judy, as depicted by Wood, was the kind of women any guy wanted to come home to once his work in the city was done for the day. Her husband Donald was a regular guy, a bit on the handsome side, but just another bloke who worked an office job. But Don was aware of the dangers that lurked in the outside world. Each and every morning, since they had been married, he had told her not to let any stranger into their house. And Judy was well aware of how uneasy Don was: “Poor Darling! He worries about me so! Always afraid something might happen to me when he leaves me alone every day!”“ Sure, a woman who looked like Judy gave a man all kinds of reasons for concern. What if some neighbor had some designs on her, or the young delivery guy who was built like hunk? What if Judy got together with the other women from the neighborhood or if she decided to go looking for a job? In the 1950s, a guy simply couldn“t worry enough it seemed, especially if he had a wife like Judy. But it was not some other man who was the threat, but an old woman begging for food and money. And Judy had a good heart, and despite Donald“s warnings Judy let her into the house. Thus, having gained access, the woman did reveal herself as a crone who was envious of Judy“s young, lovely body which for somebody like this old hag did not present a problem. She simply used some of her evil magic to trade place with the blonde. Once she had transferred her mind into her body and Judy“s mind was now trapped in the old woman“s failing body, the witch left. Judy had no other choice than to phone her husband and to admit that she had caused such a disturbance by allowing a stranger into their house. At first Don did not believe what he saw. This old woman couldn“t be his lovely wife Judy. Her transformation was simply too unreal. She managed to convince him in the end. Donald took it all in while hectically smoking a cigarette. It was all true. His wife was an old hag now. She had lost all her attractiveness. But after all, he was still the king of his own home. There had to be something he could do. He had to simply find a way to fix Judy“s mess.

Luckily, his neighbors had an eye out on what was going on around town. A guy who Donald knew who worked at the train station phoned him up to let him know that his wife was there and that she“d bought a train ticket while she was completely unaccompanied. The fellow, who insisted that he didn“t want to pry, of course, immediately knew that something was up. Maybe they“d had an argument. In any case, he felt that Don should know about this as a little courtesy from one guy to the next. This was the lucky break Judy“s husband needed. He locked the old woman who claimed that she was his wife in a closet, and quickly rushed to the station. And Don indeed had a plan. He tricked the woman with Judy“s body into believing that Judy had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The crone, confronted with the grim prospect of having to die sooner than expected as a consequence of her action, cut her loses and traded places with Judy on the spot. He rushed home where the old woman was violently banging on the door of the closet. But Don had not fought so hard in the war for nothing. Without losing a beat, he drew his trusted service revolver and shot the woman through the door. And equally callously he simple buried her corpse in the basement while Judy looked on. Now the story could have ended right there, but this was no fairy tale. Six months later, Judy Abelson awoke from a nightmare and she found herself in the old crone“s body once again which was already fairly decomposed as was to be expected. She managed to crawl up from the dirt of the make-shift grave to warn her husband. Indeed, there was his lovely wife in their bedroom getting ready to leave the house on her own once again. This time there could be only one solution. Judy, in the body of the old witch, urged him to shoot her young self so she would be free, and her husband needn“t worry about her anymore. Don did it and he was granted a few final moments with his dying wife who was thankfully back in her own body when the end came. But of course, as with many EC comics, there came a bad pun to cap this story off: “But, there“s a lesson to be learned, kiddies! Don“t make fun of that strange old woman who comes begging! You might find yourself in her shoes!”“ And looking at this tale from Gaines and Feldstein“s perspective, there was another message and moral to be found in all of this. Even if Judy had done what Don had asked of her, and she had isolated herself from any caller who came to their house and she never left the house without him, there was still this other thing that would happen to her. Judy would grow old, she would lose her looks and then she was no longer the prized possession a man like him, any man, was supposed to have. With a car, you could always trade in your current model for a new one, but with your wife this was only possible if you went for a divorce. But you had to consider your neighbors. Clearly, they didn“t mean to pry, but they always kept an eye open to see what was going on. It is interesting to note that even though this story centered around Judy, her only actions consisted of making a mistake and then asking Don to kill her. Did it then not come naturally, with the subordinate role a woman was supposed to assume, at least in these tales by Gaines and Feldstein, that men would consider them dead weight as a consequence? Men like Don didn“t like it if their women left the house, but without a job of their own and denied any agency, these women only had value in their attractiveness, and beyond that, they brought very little to the table. Bill and Al would bring this point across very vividly in another collaboration with Wood, who again proved the perfect artist for this type of story. “A Weighty Decision”“ from Weird Science No. 13 (1952), follows three men of the Air Force who are selected for a top-secret flight with a rocket ship to the moon. The story is set only a few years into the future and has all the trappings of military life in the 1950s. There is a familiar command structure in place, and the men will each have a job to do aboard the rocket ship which looks realistic in design. It is their jobs that define the men. Major Jeffry Allen, the protagonist of the story, is hand-picked for the job of commanding officer. Then there is Captain Morton Hanson who will serve as the mission“s flight engineer. And the trio is completed when Lieutenant Jack Forbes arrives on the scene who will be their radar operator. As depicted by Wood, the men are all broad-shouldered, muscular and handsome. But clearly, Allen stands out as the alpha male among the alpha males. He will of course pilot the ship which is one phallic looking object of male achievement and dominance. When he meets the daughter of the professor who has designed the rocket ship, the beautiful, raven-haired woman immediately falls in love with him. And naturally he starts to reciprocate the feelings the much younger woman has for him. After they have dated for four months, he feels it is time. A man of only a few words, he simply asks: “Marry me, Mirna?”“ However, the decide to wait till after the mission. With the day of the men“s departure ever creeping closer, Mirna is getting increasingly anxious. Until, on the night before the launch day, she lets him have it: “Please, Jeff! I love you! Promise me you“ll resign, not go tomorrow! I“m afraid you won“t ever come back!”“ Allen“s answer is two-fold. He tells her: “Don“t talk like that, honey! I“ll be back! You wait and see!”“ And he decides to calm her nerves by giving her a tour of the rocket ship. Mirna confides in him that she won“t be there for the take-off, she simply can“t bear to see him leaving. Then the men are airborne, and Wood makes all of this very exciting. It is a testament to his strengths as a storyteller, that Wood manages to make you feel the rocket“s propulsion. You were with the men inside the cabin of the rocket ship which now had escaped Earth“s gravitational pull. After this initial success, the careful calculations made in preparation go awry rather quickly. The men notice that they have used too much fuel and are still using too much. While they are frantically trying to figure out whatever the reason for this could be, they become aware of a sound that decidedly doesn“t belong to the equipment they are surrounded by. This little noise is definitely a groan, and a quick investigation reveals the shocking truth. There is a stowaway inside the cabin, hidden inside a locker. Mirna, wearing the most impractical short dress she could have picked, has snug aboard their rocket ship. She wanted to be with Jeff, of course, especially since she had overheard her father saying that the men had “a slim chance of ever coming back!”“ Jeff, who wears a t-shirt with the Air Force insignia, is clearly annoyed by her action. Not only has this severely messed up their very carefully calculated fuel ration, this way they will not have enough fuel to make it to the Moon and back. They might still make it though, if they lose weight fast. There is nothing in the cabin they can strip. The machines are all essential. Naturally, each of the men is fully prepared to lay down his life, that is until they realize that every one of them has an important job to perform, they others cannot do. That is until Mirna asks the most important question: “And if I stay?”“ A grim Jeffry let her have her answer: “We“ll be able to land on the Moon, but we might not be able to take off!”“ There she had it. There was only one solution. Jeff really had no choice and he assured her that he was only thinking of the other two men and not of himself. Then he released Mirna into the dark void of space. The men made it safely to the Moon by the end of the tale. If it had occurred to either one of them, or to all three of them, that they could have aborted the mission by Jeffry flying the rocket ship back to Earth, since he was the pilot, they did not tell her. She was simply not essential.

It was one thing that men had to constantly worry about their women; that they might get foolish ideas into their heads or they might open the door or leave the house alone. It was a different matter though if you had fallen in love with a stranger, and the girl you had married, who had presented herself as one type of person, was slowly turning out as somebody completely different. With the anxieties caused by the Cold War and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee into possible Fifth Columnists operating within the United States and from positions of influence and power, you looked at the things your neighbor did a little bit more careful. But they also observed you and had an eye out if perhaps you let things slip with your wife, and she ended up buying a train ticket all by herself. All this put men under enormous levels of stress it would seem. It only got worse when your wife was not who you thought she was. You could handle a gold digger or take care of any attempt of hers to cuckold you. But what if her real personality represented an attack on your manhood, what if this made you question your own sexuality? It is interesting that Gaines and Feldstein together with Wood explored this theme not in one of their horror stories which were much more fairy tale like and often allegorical, but in one of their science fiction offerings, which for the most part tried to create the impression that a lot of the stuff these contained could happen in a not too far future. The word science was in the name of Weird Science after all, and if you wanted something a bit more fantastic-like, there was always its companion title, Weird Fantasy. Interestingly then, that “There“ll Be Some Changes Made!”“ appeared as the lead-in story for Weird Science No. 14 (1952). The cover by Wood was perfect to whet the readers“ appetite. Heroic space explorers in skintight space suits and with transparent bubble helmets were approaching a lovely female who stood in an alien vista that came with mountainous regions and lush vegetation. It was a scene of tranquility, of serenity even, except for the weapons the men carried. Like the first men who had embarked on the Mayflower, these men landed on this alien planet with the same ideals and ideas of peace. They were benevolent colonists who brought their high-tech equipment and machinery, their religion of science and progress, to the indigenous people of this world. In this story though, this exploration of a foreign world was necessitated when the overdrive of the men“s spaceship failed. With every other already explored system too far out of reach, the ship“s commander, another rugged, good looking type who smoked a pipe and whose fanciful space uniform implied that he was highly decorated despite his young age, made the decision that they would land on an unknown planet to start with the necessary repairs to make it back to Earth. Naturally, the locals are afraid of the men and they run from their city to an array of igloo-like structures to provide them with shelter from the invaders who luckily carry a machine with them that allows them to communicate in any language and quickly a message of peace is conveyed to the inhabitants of this world. Now this makes everything much easier and the men are invited to a feast by a local ruler. It is there, that Commander Morrison spies a beautiful blonde girl who is Judy times ten. Though her attire is somewhat exotic by way of medieval times, she looks like a healthy young woman of Earth. With no time to waste, of which he actually has enough until his ship is repaired, the Commander initiates the mating rituals of Earth to the best of his abilities. Once Morrison has learned her name, he activates his dating overdrive: “You are very beautiful, Luwana! Are you”¦er”¦ married?”“ Naturally, without not much to go by other than her lovely exterior, Morrison falls in love. It is once his men tell him that the ship has been repaired, that he announces his decision. He will stay on this world to marry Luwana. With the other guys out of the picture, he even took the time to hand in a proper resignation from active duty, and the blonde woman looking lovelier by the minute, this world is seemingly an open book to him. What is even more perfect, there are no children around. As his bride explains to him, they are kept outside the city and are raised by specialists not to burden their mothers. In fact, Luwana considers motherhood an idea that does not apply to her people, though she does bring Morrison along when one of those children emerges from his igloo-like structure which reminds him of a tiny bomb-shelter. The boy is welcomed into the community and the shell he has crawled out from is carried to the place where the other ones are stored, and when Luwana notices that Morrison has none of his own, this is quickly rectified. It is not that they live in those things, but in a nice house, so Morrison doesn“t mind. But things began to change. A strange, slow transformation had beset his beautiful wife: “It“s about six months later that the strange sequence of events begins. At first, I don“t think anything of it when Luwana cuts her long golden hair short”¦ or when she begins to lose her exotic figure”¦ But when her face begins to change slightly, I question her.”“ Morrison jumps to what seems the most logical explanation to him. But no, his wife is not expecting. Perhaps she is no longer in love with him? But she confirms that she still loves him. Frustrated, he does what a man must do. He goes exploring. He climbs across the wall that separates the city from the building where the children are kept who haven“t joined the community yet. Morrison observes some of the babies as they crawl free from their igloo-like shells. It is then that he figures out the secret of Luwana“s people: “Snails! That“s what they are! That explains why Luwana has been acting strangely lately! These people are like the variety of snails back on Earth that are hermaphroditic! They chance sex! The male changes to a female, and”¦ gulp”¦ vice versa!”“ With his heart hammering against his manly chest he sprints home. There was Luwana, alright, waiting in the bedroom, waiting for him. She was still beautiful, but she was a young man now, with a beard growing on her soft checks. And perhaps worst of all, she or he expected her or his husband to “change”¦ so that things can be normal again!”“ Now here was a tale that betrayed some of the anxieties men had before “The Crying Game”“ ever shot its first frame. But all of these were just some science fiction yarns. Move on, if you were offended, dear reader. In other words, as long as this came in the guise of stories which involved alien planets and spaceships, there was always an element of fantasy that took away the sting. But around the same time, Gaines and Feldstein put together a new series that ostensibly was all about realistic settings and the world outside your window. This was their Frontline Combat for suburban life.

The stories created in collaboration between Gaines, Feldstein and Wood for Shock SuspenStories are today well-regarded for how fearlessly they tackled themes like racism, bigotry, mob mentality, greed, corruption and social injustice. Known as “preachies”“ these are powerful, mature stories that resonate to this day. But within this attempt at realism, Gaines and Feldstein also reveal much about the society and the times they themselves were very much a part of. Two tales in particular reflect the duo“s anxiety when it came to women who behaved outside the norm. Whereas “There“ll Be Some Changes Made!”“ was a tale about gender fluidity, one that maybe was in many ways lightyears ahead of its time, in issue No. 8 of Shock SuspenStories from 1953, they and Wood presented a story about a women who didn“t change into a man literally, but who behaved like one in regard to her sexuality. Whereas such conduct was tolerated in unattached males (with other men standing by to admire it), not only was it not alright for a woman to act in such a manner, but according to the story, a woman needed to be punished if she ever displayed any such tendencies of transgression. “The Assault”“ finds an elderly couple transfixed in a state of worry. Their daughter has gone missing since the night before. Dawn is slowly approaching in the east, but because of a thunderstorm, there are dark clouds overhead. The old folks are out on their porch. They are surrounded by a group of men from their town. Regular men, guys who work everyday jobs, but who are now clad in trench coats and hunter jackets. They all wait. And when lighting crashes in the background, Lucy makes her entrance. The light from the porch and the thunderstorm gives her an almost ghost-like appearance. She seems dazed and she moves like a somnambulist. However, the girl, who is clad in a tight sweater and a long, pleated skirt is keenly aware of what is going on. She does not need one of the men telling her that the whole town has been looking for her. She had not expected this commotion, though, which had clearly been instigated by her prolonged absence from her parents“ care. Instantaneously she began to sob, all the while she kept observing the reactions of the men who“d assembled on her parents“ porch. Her tale, which she slowly brought forward with more tears, was one of shame and sordidness. But she also showed defiance when she related the event which had caused her staying out this late: “It was old Hodges! He”¦ he forced me to stay in his cabin. He locked me in and he did things!”“ While Lucy goes down on her knees as if she was seeking atonement for the things which had been done to her, most likely simply motivated by her attractiveness, unfortunately, the old lady was still a bit slow on the uptake. Apparently, her mother needed Lucy to paint her a picture. The men present, however, they understood. They were men after all. But Lucy was ready to furnish the timeline: “He kept me there! He wouldn“t let me go. He kept me there all night and all day and all last night. This morning he fell asleep and I escaped.”“ And while the men now discussed the matter among themselves, the helpful narrator filled readers in: “Old Hodges. The town recluse. The town derelict. Living alone on the outskirts in his shabby cabin.”“ It is Lucy“s father, with an expression of rightful indignation clenching his facial features, who stirs the men into action. They arm themselves with clubs and bats. Then they pay the old man an unexpected visit. They storm into his cabin and they each take their turn until he“s dead. With the sun rising and order restored, they all go about their day. But in the afternoon, a fellow called George rings the bell of Lucy“s house, demanding to speak to her. He is a bit disheveled looking, but attractive, and he is at least in his late twenties. Bruskly, he moves past Lucy“s father who had come to answer the door. While the old man attempts some pathetic posturing, all the while forgetting that the other man is half his age, Lucy arrives, and she tells her Dad off. She will speak to George. She and he leave the house and go for a drive. Once they are in the nearby woods, readers got to hear George“s story from his perspective. He“d been the girl“s secret lover since Lucy had initiated contact when she“d seen him sitting all by himself at a roadside dinner. They went for a drive and they made out in George“s car on that night, and on many nights afterwards. Lucy stayed overnight and she always had an excuse ready for her parents. George was in love with her and he even introduced her to Old Hodges whom he considered a surrogate father. But when she decided to stay at his apartment not for one night, but for the whole next day and into the early morning, he simply had to overdo it: “I want to marry you, Lucy!”“, he said, with confidence in himself and their relationship. The thought hadn“t even occurred to George that Lucy was not the type of girl who married the first guy she was intimate with, not that he was the first guy at all. Not even the second. She laughed at his marriage proposal and then she let him have it, sensing that playtime was over: “You don“t think you“re the only man I“ve known, do you, George? Don“t be so egotistical! I“ve had plenty before you! I like ”˜em! And you won“t be the last, either!”“ He had kicked her out of the apartment while she still mocked him. In the woods, George told her that he was going to tell everybody about her, especially when he realized how callously Lucy reacted to him mentioning Hodges“ death. She had to protect her reputation, she told him. She also informed George that she was certain that he wasn“t going tattle on her after all, like all the other men before him: “You“re forgetting, George! When you open your”¦ mouth when you tell”¦ what really happened, you“re sending yourself up the river for twenty years! I“m seventeen, you know, and in this state, there“s a law”¦”“ Challenged to his core by the girl, and still visibly shaken from what had transpired, like Donald with Judy, George now drew a gun on Lucy. He gleaned irony from the fact that the revolver had belonged to Hodges. Not only did he shoot Lucy, but he fired six bullets into her face. And with her body at his feet, he began to sob uncontrollably. While Lucy had faked her tears, his were genuine. But the question remained, who he was crying for. Did he cry for a love lost that had never been real or did George cry for having been such a fool that he still believed in boy meets girl? You got married and then you lived happily ever after. But in this world now, romance was a thing you did for kicks. And men were now the prey like women had been all those years. Still it is surprising how viciously Lucy meets her end. The message of this tale by two writers and one artist was clear: you could not trust a woman, especially not a very beautiful one. And Wally Wood indeed went out of his way to draw Lucy as wickedly beautiful. The way he highlighted certain aspects of her body immediately made any male reader into another George. But when the next issue hit the stands it seemed that he had held back. Wood was getting ready to pull out all the stops.

Gaines and Feldstein, again with Wood on art, picked up this theme of trust in the very next story they did together. In Shock SuspenStories No. 9 (1953), this resulted in one of Wood“s most famous stories, a tale Feldstein actually told twice when he later commissioned equally legendary artist Frank Frazetta to work on it for their attempt at publishing a line of magazines, they had named Picto Fiction. Though the Frazetta version never saw completion due to the line getting cancelled rather quickly, Wood“s first version has been reprinted numerous times. “Came The Dawn”“ begins with what by now was the proto-typical Wally Wood man. A ruggedly good-looking guy who knew his way around the woods and a gun alike. The first panel is a study in contrast and reminiscent of the cover for Weird Science No. 14. There is an armed man and there is a woman. He holds a hunting rifle with a long barrel. He is clad in clothes that you would expect on a guy who is comfortable in the forest among the wild beasts. The woman is naked except for bed sheet. She is of course beautiful and blonde like Judy and Luwana, but she seems as young as Lucy. The man, Bob Ames, has a pipe between his lips and the captions Feldstein provides and which are told from Ames“ perspective, are drenched in machismo at first. He is a man“s man who can tell you every detail about his hunting rifle and probably about every tree and wildlife, but women are a mystery to him. Especially one who is this gorgeous and who clearly comes from money. She has entered his cabin while he was out. As she explains, she was walking through the forest, then, she says she fell into a stream, which is the reason why she now had the white sheet wrapped around her body, and having lost her way back to her father“s cabin, she simply entered Bob“s thinking it was the lodge of her old man. With the night now approaching, Bob suggests that she stays overnight. Then he hands her some of his spare clothes, which are too big for her naturally, but look very cute on her. She offers to cook dinner while she introduces herself. Her name is Cathy Maxwell, and when Bob mentions, while sucking on his pipe, his eyes now following every movement she makes, that he hasn“t heard this name around here with the families who own a cabin, she has an explanation for this as well. Even though he is suspicious of her and her story, they talk and then they flirt with each other. She tells him about the engagement she has just broken off. Things quickly escalate from there and Bob and Cathy get intimate. Like Lucy in the previous story, Cathy takes the initiative. But both women act very differently still. Lucy led the man on she had picked up in a dinner, giving him the idea that he was in charge, to conceal her true nature and not to shake his believe in his own masculinity, and it is he who kisses her first. Cathy is much more upfront. In what is a total role reversal when compared to Morrison and Luwana, she asks Bob if he is attached. He isn“t like Luwana wasn“t, which in her mind means that he is game now. Cathy asks him for a cigarette, and with her upper body bend forward, she blows the smoke into his face. This is clearly a come on. Then she tells him that she wants him to sit next to her, indicating the spot. She is a sexual predator now, and while Bob may know the wild animals in the forest, this animal is far beyond his purview. Not only does she tell him that it is ok that he kissed her, she almost demands it. And when he feels that he needs to reassert his manhood by suggesting that he better put another log on the fire, the most archaic trope of the hunter-protector, minding the fire in the cave, she instead wants him to hold her. This cuts right to the next panel which shows her sleeping on the sofa, stretched out, her back to the reader. She is fully clothed, and Bob puts a blanket over her. Now that she is sleeping, he can act out his protector role. It is left to the readers“ imagination though, what might or might not have taken place between the two panels. In any case, the girl has made a profound impression on Bob. The scene seems to be one of serenity. With Cathy sleeping, everything seems perfect. But there is a lot going on. Whereas in his narration he claims that he“s lighting up his pipe, Bob has a cigarette between his fingers. While perhaps Bob was misremembering some of the details, this nevertheless offers a visual cue that things had begun to change in subtle ways. While he is clearly a cigarette smoker (he has those already in his cabin), Bob had been smoking his pipe throughout the first part of the story. He“s begun to adapt his habits according to Cathy. Bob had led a perfect, solitary life up to now, undisturbed and framed by his familiar cabin and his hunting activities. But it had been a dry life. Cathy has brought the chaos and the spark. When Bob talks about the fire which he now minds, he is not talking about the fire: “I watched the flames leaping hungrily, licking at the dry fuel. I looked at Cathy”¦ beautiful, desirable Cathy”¦”“ Cathy has fallen asleep on the sofa, but Bob is wide awake. Immediately his thoughts reveal that his reactions are like those of George and even like Donald Abelson“s (who was indeed “able”“ in getting Judy to marry him). Bob wants to possess the girl he has just met, all the while not realizing that like Lucy with George, it is she who is calling the shots: “All my life I“ve looked for her. All my life. And, she“s here”¦ beside me, and she“s mine.”“ But is she really and had he really been looking “for her all his life”“? It seems more like he had led a well structure life, content with himself and his activities. Her arrival has stirred him though.

With this outsider, the world has begun to intrude into his life. There are dangers associated with this, and Bob knows this. Like person who thought himself the only survivor of an invasion, once secluded in his lone watch post, Bob began to listen for further signals from the world beyond his cabin. To learn if it was safe to leave the house. It wasn“t, and worst of all, one of those invaders was with him right now. It was the radio that offered the terrible truth to him. The outside world was a dangerous place indeed: “Police are combing the countryside north of here in search of a young woman who escaped from the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane yesterday. Citizens are warned to stay indoors. This woman is dangerous. She is five foot four inches tall, 22 years old, with natural blonde hair. Last seen by a hunter”¦ east of the State Highway, dressed in the institution“s regular blue uniform. However, she will probably attempt to rid herself of these tell-tale clothes. Originally committed”¦ for the cold-blooded stabbing of the man to whom she was engaged, this woman is deemed capable of killing again”¦”“ Immediately Bob“s mind goes to Cathy, his keen hunter“s instinct on alert: “My blood froze in my veins. I looked at Cathy. She fit the description perfectly. And she did have that blue outfit.”“ When she awakes, Bob“s behavior has changed. He is now in a hurry to get her out of the cabin. While he maneuvers her outside, she pulls her trump card. Weren“t they engaged now? This makes him even more anxious since he recalls what she had told him about her previous engagement. He“s reminded of that particular detail from the radio broadcast. It is all clear to him now. This predatory, this man-eater, has her sights trained on him. Cathy intends to make him her next victim. Bob locks her out of the cabin. And while she pleads with him and reminds him of what happened last night, he sits in a chair in the middle of the cabin, his trusted rifle, the symbol of his re-established manhood, resting in his lap. Even when she screams, he chalks this up to her insanity. Then he sees the blood that is seeping into the cabin through the crack under the bolted door. There she was. Her body was stretched out. She was nude once again, only covered with a uniform like the one described by the radio. A long knife was stuck into her neck. And in the distance, there was a small figure of a blonde woman running away, dressed in the t-shirt and the jeans he had lent to the girl who now lay dead at his feet. He“d allowed chaos into his life. But as it turned out, he wasn“t ready for it. This tale, just seven page long, was another masterclass of Wood“s artistic skills, which had been developing by leaps and bounds in just a short period of time, but also for Gaines and Feldstein“s cynical worldview. However, one issue later, the trio would upend their approach completely. In Weird Science No. 19 (1953) readers were introduced to a perfect world of tomorrow which had mastered immortality and eternal youth, a dream that in reality had eluded mankind so far. In “The Precious Years”“, certainly one of Wood“s most beautifully rendered science fiction stories, we meet Martin. Though he looks like an extremely handsome, very manly and well-built man in his late twenties, he is actually one hundred-fifty years old. Today is the day he is to receive his usual pre-scheduled “longevity-shot”“ which will grant him another decade in this perpetual state of immutability. He“s done it all. He“s been with everybody. He“s had eleven wives, but he is alone. And he is bored. Nothing in this society poses a challenge. There are no stakes. In a way, he is caught up in a time-loop, destined to re-live every experience he“s already made, each as shallow as the next since he knows the outcome. “I“m a living corpse”¦ that“s what I am!”“, Martin mutters all to himself once he“s reached the municipal building to receive the next ten years of a life that doesn“t hold any meaning for him any longer. This is where he meets Jean, a blonde woman who is drop-dead gorgeous, but who is very different from all the other women like Judy, Lucy or Cathy. Jean is like Martin. She“s done it all as well. Jean has been with many men, but there is nobody to judge her for it. Like Martin she“s been married many times, and there are no illusions. Though she and Martin are beautiful people, they both have a hardened, battle-weary look to their faces. They just pass each other in the hallway and are friendly with each other. They know exactly who the other person is. They are identical in the way their lives have played out so far. But once called in, Martin is surprised to learn that this time around he has a choice. As the efficient, bald-headed official explains to him, Martin can choose between going on living like he has, or death. Martin lets it all out, all his frustrations, adventures experienced or not, because what was the point ultimately if there was no fight? He chooses death. So has Jean, who he runs into again as he leaves the official“s office. They talk about their personal history, and even though they are young and at their most beautiful, their minds are those of old folks who do not like the state of things and look back to a past when everything was better and much more intense. But they reminisce about a life they have never known, a life whose struggles and challenges they both deeply romanticize. This is very much Wood“s comment on a past that offered much more richness than our modern, civilized and pre-packaged life experience could hold for him. Wally Wood was romanticist and it isn“t surprising that he glorifies a time in which being alive meant daily contest and sacrifice. Now facing death, Martin and Jean come alive themselves. They know they only have a few moments left in their previously never-ending lifetime. And even though they have found each other, it is Jean who tells him that there is no going back now. It is the inevitability of death that gives their romance its meaning. Since they only have a few precious moments, everything they do matters. They are both shot dead by the official. But this is not how the story ends. Martin and Jean awake aboard a spaceship that will bring them to a new, untamed world. They“ll have the rest of their lives to live out in hardship and happiness.

Author Profile

Chris Buse

A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.

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