AI
Monday, December 05, 2022 6:16:30 PM
Sure do look similar. Looks a Wolverton came before a Crumb
BASIL WOLVERTON: AMERICA’S WEIRDEST ARTIST
March 31, 2020
Alan Bisbort
All Please Kill Me Posts
Cartoonist Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) cast a large, if sometimes unrecognized, shadow over the underground comix of the 1960s and punk graphics of the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Crumb and his two cartooning brothers were smitten with his work in MAD magazine, and the master of the macabre Gahan Wilson said, “No small child exposed to his drawings could ever be expected to walk in a straight line again, or vote a party ticket.” Wolverton’s reputation as “America’s weirdest artist” continues to grow 40+ years after his death.
Robert Crumb is often, rightfully, cited as the godfather of underground comix. Before R. Crumb, though, there was Basil Wolverton (1909-1978), who could rightfully be called the ur-Crumb. Wolverton began plying his cartooning trade in the late 1930s and was, by 1960, called “America’s weirdest artist” by no less an arbiter of coolness than Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
His contorted portraits, what he called “preposterous pictures of peculiar people,” combined with his meticulous cross-hatching graphic style can be seen in the work of Crumb, as well as Bill “Zippy” Griffith, Kim Deitch, Trina Robbins, Diane Noomin, S. Clay Wilson, Jay Kinney, Robert Williams and many more.
Since his death in 1978, Wolverton has continued to gain a rabid following. In 2009, when a retrospective of his work was mounted in New York, art critic Holland Carter, reviewing the show for the New York Times, called Wolverton the “van Gogh of the gross-out” and “the Michelangelo of MAD magazine,” using words like “pathological” and “uncouth” to describe the work on view. He called one of Wolverton’s most famous pieces—a grotesque MAD magazine cover from 1954—“a virtuoso exercise in bad taste.”
In other words, Basil Wolverton is right up PKM’s alley—starting with that amazingly strange name, itself seemingly culled from a Charles Addams cartoon. In fact, in the 1950s, Wolverton produced a series of drawings called “Private Peeps at Preposterous Punks Who Prowl This Planet.” Gahan Wilson, the cartoonist who mined the macabre in his art and willingly admitted the influence of Wolverton on his work, said, “No small child exposed to his drawings could ever be expected to walk in a straight line again, or vote a party ticket.”
Surely, Wolverton’s drawings in MAD began warping the minds of the Crumb brothers when they were small children leafing through their magazines. Indeed, it is not out of the realm of possibility that had Wolverton not created Lena the Hyena, we may have had no Mr. Natural, Snoid, Devil Girl, or even Keep on Truckin’. And what a loss that would have been for Western civilization!
https://pleasekillme.com/basil-wolverton/
"But on a semi-related note. Being an artist and unrequited cartoonist, I've seen that wolverton cartoons before and I submit he/she is very close to plagiarism from the well loved old cartoonist Art Crumb. Check out woverton's small details in shading, facial construction and body parts and compare them to Art Crumbs style."
I'm assuming your Art Crumb is one of the Crumb brothers mentioned in the article
above. I don't know if the Wolverton of the cartoon i posted was Basil Wolverton.
I've always thought the cartoons i get from The Week .. https://theweek.com/cartoons .. were drawn by contemporary artists. Maybe not.
BASIL WOLVERTON: AMERICA’S WEIRDEST ARTIST
March 31, 2020
Alan Bisbort
All Please Kill Me Posts
Cartoonist Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) cast a large, if sometimes unrecognized, shadow over the underground comix of the 1960s and punk graphics of the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Crumb and his two cartooning brothers were smitten with his work in MAD magazine, and the master of the macabre Gahan Wilson said, “No small child exposed to his drawings could ever be expected to walk in a straight line again, or vote a party ticket.” Wolverton’s reputation as “America’s weirdest artist” continues to grow 40+ years after his death.
Robert Crumb is often, rightfully, cited as the godfather of underground comix. Before R. Crumb, though, there was Basil Wolverton (1909-1978), who could rightfully be called the ur-Crumb. Wolverton began plying his cartooning trade in the late 1930s and was, by 1960, called “America’s weirdest artist” by no less an arbiter of coolness than Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
His contorted portraits, what he called “preposterous pictures of peculiar people,” combined with his meticulous cross-hatching graphic style can be seen in the work of Crumb, as well as Bill “Zippy” Griffith, Kim Deitch, Trina Robbins, Diane Noomin, S. Clay Wilson, Jay Kinney, Robert Williams and many more.
Since his death in 1978, Wolverton has continued to gain a rabid following. In 2009, when a retrospective of his work was mounted in New York, art critic Holland Carter, reviewing the show for the New York Times, called Wolverton the “van Gogh of the gross-out” and “the Michelangelo of MAD magazine,” using words like “pathological” and “uncouth” to describe the work on view. He called one of Wolverton’s most famous pieces—a grotesque MAD magazine cover from 1954—“a virtuoso exercise in bad taste.”
In other words, Basil Wolverton is right up PKM’s alley—starting with that amazingly strange name, itself seemingly culled from a Charles Addams cartoon. In fact, in the 1950s, Wolverton produced a series of drawings called “Private Peeps at Preposterous Punks Who Prowl This Planet.” Gahan Wilson, the cartoonist who mined the macabre in his art and willingly admitted the influence of Wolverton on his work, said, “No small child exposed to his drawings could ever be expected to walk in a straight line again, or vote a party ticket.”
Surely, Wolverton’s drawings in MAD began warping the minds of the Crumb brothers when they were small children leafing through their magazines. Indeed, it is not out of the realm of possibility that had Wolverton not created Lena the Hyena, we may have had no Mr. Natural, Snoid, Devil Girl, or even Keep on Truckin’. And what a loss that would have been for Western civilization!
https://pleasekillme.com/basil-wolverton/
"But on a semi-related note. Being an artist and unrequited cartoonist, I've seen that wolverton cartoons before and I submit he/she is very close to plagiarism from the well loved old cartoonist Art Crumb. Check out woverton's small details in shading, facial construction and body parts and compare them to Art Crumbs style."
I'm assuming your Art Crumb is one of the Crumb brothers mentioned in the article
above. I don't know if the Wolverton of the cartoon i posted was Basil Wolverton.
I've always thought the cartoons i get from The Week .. https://theweek.com/cartoons .. were drawn by contemporary artists. Maybe not.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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