Wallace Wood: Against the Grain, part 46 The life of Wallace Wood is found in inked lines on paper, not in quotes. When the interviewers approached with tape recorders running, he usually eluded them. Wood had little to say about his achievements because he had already said it in thousands of panels and pages. He projected himself through his work, as Elder observed, to the extent that his Winsor-Newton brush became a conduit for all that he had absorbed and experienced. The man and the art became synonymous. Just as one can see the history of cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s films, the entire history of newspaper strips and comic books seems to live and breathe in the body of work created by Wallace Wood. To some he was simply the greatest cartoonist who ever lived. But if you had happened to ask him about that, he probably would have just grinned and said, “I’m an artist. I do it for a living.”

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©2007 Bhob Stewart  ¶ 6:53 PM