Thursday, July 23, 2009
MAKING IT TO THE BIG TIME
When I was a kid, one of my favorite cartoonists was Basil Wolverton.
We all loved his stuff.
There was even a girl in school who adopted the name of one of his characters, Lena the Hyena. Don't ask.
I followed his work long before he began working with Mad Magazine which I was actually kinda cool about. Still I looked at his work very closely.
In college, I roomed next to a guy who had perfected the Wolverton style and made silk screened posters for school activities. It was his major activity and he almost flunked out.
Now, it seems, Wolverton has become high art and it is high time.
Wolverton had a graphic style that has been imitated through the years but never equaled.
He was an expert at line drawing and somehow managed to convey basic truths in his exaggerated renditions of real and imaginary people, usually human "types" that all of us are familiar with. Universal caricatures. Or not.
Sometimes he could do real people better than they could do themselves. You may not remember John L. Lewis, but I do. Coal used to be the energy lifeline. Lewis, the union president.
Less known are the "realistic" drawings he did which do not have the trademark physical distortions but still have the same feel. Scary.
Oddly enough, Wolverton was a church guy and wanted his religious illustrations to be remembered more than the grotesques.
Don't miss the slide show in the Times article.
