Best Of Witzend

by Wallace Wood, Bill Pearson, Art Spiegelman, Reed Crandall, Al Williamson

Overview

This comics anthology collects some of the best creator-owned work of some of the very best mid-century cartoonists: Ditko, Frazetta, Kurtzman, Wood, and many more.

Cartoonist Wallace Wood created and published his own magazine — witzend. Witzend immediately became a venue for personal work, without regard to commercial constraints and with contributors like Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, and Reed Crandall. (And that was just the first issue!) In later issues, Steve Ditko, Art Spiegelman, Vaughn Bodé, Jim Steranko, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Howard Chaykin, Bernie Wrightson — and dozens more — joined in.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683961154
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	08/14/2018
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 11.80(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Wallace Allan Wood (1927–1981) rebooted Marvel's Daredevil, designing the iconic costume that recently appeared on the smash hit Netflix series. He was one of the best and funniest cartoonists of the earliest iteration of Mad magazine and, thanks to his work on the EC Comics line, he is also widely considered one of America’s greatest science-fiction cartoonists. With his magazine anthology witzend, he helped pioneer underground/independent comics publishing.

Bill Pearson (b. 1938) got his start as an assistant to Wallace Wood. He was an independent editor and publisher. He lives in Arizona.

Art Spiegelman is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning creator of Maus. He's also a groundbreaking editor, whose recent projects include the Toon books line of graphic novels for school libraries, as well as the 1980s seminal comics anthology Raw, which introduced cartoonists like Charles Burns and helped kickstart the alternative comics movement. He's long been associated with the New Yorker.

Reed Crandall (1917–1982, Indiana) is best known for his art for EC—and later Warren's—horror, crime, war, and adventure comics; he also contributed to Flash Gordon in the 1960s. Some of his more family-friendly work was featured in the Classics Illustrated and Treasure Chest series; he drew the Buster Brown comics for Buster Brown shoe stores for many years. He attended the Cleveland School of Art in Ohio, graduating in 1939, and served briefly in the Air Force during WWII—which served him well as one of the primary artists for the aviator-team comic Blackhawk. Crandall was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2009.

Al Williamson (b. 1931, d, 2010) was a comics artist best known for his work on EC's Weird Science and Weird Fantasy comics titles (and, later, Creepy and Eerie, comics magazines that featured EC alumni). He also adapted Star Wars into comics, and worked on the newspaper strips Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X-9, both creations of Alex Raymond. He also inked various Marvel superhero comics, and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2000.