The fact of the matter is that Woody was never afraid to draw a pretty girl, a naked girl or a girl having sex. Toward the end of his life, pornography became his main source of income, first from PURITAN (a pioneering hardcore newsstand mag), Al Goldstein’s SCREW newspaper and its magazine counterpart, NATIONAL SCREW. Wood’s WEIRD SEX FANTASY PORTFOLIO was the only commercial portfolio he ever released. His latter day move to the West Coast was facilitated by Barbara Friedman’s Nuance Publications which published three issues of (supposedly) all-Wood sex comics in magazine form.
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The fact that Wally Wood would do a complete hardcore porn comic somehow seemed at the time not so much a comedown as a natural progression. Starting with his gorgeous EC women, then his fifties girlie cartoons, the clothing optional SALLY FORTH comic strip, the portfolio and the mid-seventies adult magazine work…it just made sense for him to do a full-on sex comic book. In fact, in the aftermath of early seventies”porno chic,” it was a pioneering move for a mainstream comic book artist of his caliber!
The problem, of course, was the circumstances. The times being what they were, GANG BANG could not have existed ten years earlier and yet THAT is when it might well have worked for Wood. By the time of its publication, his health was degenerating quickly and had been affecting his once-pristine art for several years. He was much slower, used more paste-ins and tracings than ever and had no assistants of the high quality he had used for years. As such, the first issue, although clearly Woodwork, is disappointing, the second is without a doubt the worst material he ever had published and the third, posthumous, issue consists of reprints of varying quality from other sources.
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GANG BANG publisher Barbara Friedman was, by all accounts, the one to find Wallace Wood’s body after his late 1981 suicide. She had hired him and befriended him but that didn’t keep her from continuing to exploit his name even after his death. A year and a half later, Nuance released GANG BANG # 3, with a cover touting “Wood’s Women and Wit.” The art used on the cover was originally meant for an unrealized Wood project to have been called STRANGE SYMPHONIES.
This issue is actually much better than the previous effort as it deals completely with previously published work. We open with 24 black and white pages of MALICE IN WONDERLAND, the dirty but witty softcore strip the artist had originally published in color in France and in NATIONAL SCREW before his health had gotten too bad . This strip shows Wood at perhaps a peak for his erotic work. Although cut up, repasted and in some cases blown up way too big, the wit and skill show through even though the presentation is hardly the finest this material would see.
This is followed by some reprinted gag pages from SCREW and the SEX FANTASY PORTFOLIO as well as a page of sketches that include everything from SALLY FORTH to THE WIZARD KING! The reappearance of one of the badly drawn Sally pages from the last volume rears its ugly head but then we move on to FLESH FUCKER MEETS WOMEN’S LIB, a second FLASH GORDON parody in this series, this one being done in 1977 in a softcore MAD-style for, I believe, THE NATIONAL SCREW again. It’s not bad.
THE BLIZZARD OF OOZE, again cut up and repasted for some reason, originally appeared in PURITAN and is, as it sounds like, a hardcore WIZARD OF OZ parody. Although not as well-drawn as MALICE, it’s hard to tell just how many of the strip’s shortcomings are attributable to its less than stellar presentation here. Rounding out the issue are a few more extremely well done single panel bits from the Portfolio and SCREW.
