Wallace Wood: Against the Grain, part 27 J. Hoberman, in Artforum (February 1982) wrote, “Mad pushed certain aspects of the medium to their limits: Wallace Wood’s ‘Sound Effects’ (Mad #20), for example, is a hard-boiled detective story told, without dialogue, over a succession of ear-splitting graphics. The (Tex) Avery techniques of direct address and interpolated messages were totally integrated into the Mad house-style, which was itself deconstructed in Wood’s ‘Julius Caesar’ (Mad #17)... Wallace Wood, who specialized in pygmy cretins, overstacked dolls, and frames with the visual consistency of an exploding spittoon, represented Mad at its most aggressively tasteless...” Cartoonist-publisher Denis Kitchen (in A History of Underground Comics) stated flatly, “No one today is turning out anything to compare with the stuff Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Will Elder, et al. were doing in the early Fifties.” But Wood himself, in 1972, had only this laconic comment: “I like the funny stuff because it’s less effort, you know.”  ¶ 6:13 AM