Just Thinkin' 'Bout Basil Wolverton
For The Fiddleback: Shit We Like, September 2012
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The earliest nightmare I can remember involved being chased by a maniacal axe-wielding Captain Crunch. That’s a pretty scary prospect for any kid. Something about the incongruous benevolence of the character as I had always understood him, and his representation as demonic, blood thirsty madman, really stayed with me over the years. The horror I felt in the dream was not truly matched by any kind of reasonable adult fear until sometime in my mid-twenties when I stumbled across Basil Wolverton’s “Lena the Hyena.” Initially a frequently referred to but never seen character in Al Capp’s comic strip Lil’ Abner, Wolverton’s Lena was designed as a response to a contest to depict the world’s ugliest woman.
Among 500,000 entries, the repulsive caricature
stood out to jurors Salvador Dali, Boris Karloff and Frank Sinatra – and
Wolverton was thereafter frequently employed by the likes of Life
magazine and later, Mad. Known and acclaimed
as “Producer
of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People who Prowl this Perplexing Planet,”
the comic artist was prolific in illustrating science fiction short stories as
well as comics for Marvel. The influence
of his “Spaghetti and Meatballs” style would reach much further into the pop
culture psyche, however, as his freakish Tex Avery meets Todd Browning approach
to caricatures would be of great importance to the work of famed cartoonist Ed
“Big Daddy” Roth, making Rat Fink a permanent staple of hot
rod culture.
Wolverton’s influence reached another hugely important comic artist of our day, but not in the way you might think. At the same time that Wolverton was producing and exploiting freakish cartoon anatomies, he was working full time on what he considered to be his most personal and important work, a straightforward graphic depiction of The Bible. Wolverton was himself immensely religious, being baptized into Herbert Armstrong’s “Radio Church of God” in his later years (similarly, Roth became a devout Mormon late in life). However, it was the notorious horn ball Robert Crumb who followed suit with a remarkably clean and direct telling of the Book of Genesis, which told the story through a reverent stylistic lens. In both cases, the results were hugely important for the world of comics, and extremely ambitious and personal creative accomplishments.
What might be Wolverton’s greatest legacy, though, is his unprecedented capacity for depicting human ugliness in tandem with both fantasy and reality. He drew equally from both wells – and all of his work contains as much organic naturalism as it does surreal atrocity. Anybody who has even dabbled in fine art will grow very tired of the conversation which is incessantly happening in galleries about the relationship between the ugly and the beautiful. While this is a necessary evil, Wolverton’s contribution to graphic art has left an indelible mark which works as a great palette cleanser: unabashedly gross and repugnant while still seeming somehow benevolent and meaningful.
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The earliest nightmare I can remember involved being chased by a maniacal axe-wielding Captain Crunch. That’s a pretty scary prospect for any kid. Something about the incongruous benevolence of the character as I had always understood him, and his representation as demonic, blood thirsty madman, really stayed with me over the years. The horror I felt in the dream was not truly matched by any kind of reasonable adult fear until sometime in my mid-twenties when I stumbled across Basil Wolverton’s “Lena the Hyena.” Initially a frequently referred to but never seen character in Al Capp’s comic strip Lil’ Abner, Wolverton’s Lena was designed as a response to a contest to depict the world’s ugliest woman.
Wolverton’s influence reached another hugely important comic artist of our day, but not in the way you might think. At the same time that Wolverton was producing and exploiting freakish cartoon anatomies, he was working full time on what he considered to be his most personal and important work, a straightforward graphic depiction of The Bible. Wolverton was himself immensely religious, being baptized into Herbert Armstrong’s “Radio Church of God” in his later years (similarly, Roth became a devout Mormon late in life). However, it was the notorious horn ball Robert Crumb who followed suit with a remarkably clean and direct telling of the Book of Genesis, which told the story through a reverent stylistic lens. In both cases, the results were hugely important for the world of comics, and extremely ambitious and personal creative accomplishments.
What might be Wolverton’s greatest legacy, though, is his unprecedented capacity for depicting human ugliness in tandem with both fantasy and reality. He drew equally from both wells – and all of his work contains as much organic naturalism as it does surreal atrocity. Anybody who has even dabbled in fine art will grow very tired of the conversation which is incessantly happening in galleries about the relationship between the ugly and the beautiful. While this is a necessary evil, Wolverton’s contribution to graphic art has left an indelible mark which works as a great palette cleanser: unabashedly gross and repugnant while still seeming somehow benevolent and meaningful.
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