Woodwork

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“Wally may have been our most troubled artist… I’m not suggesting any connection, but he may have been our most brilliant.”

- EC Comics Publisher William Gaines

Woodwork features the art of legendary and hard-charging comic book artist Wally Wood. Called by many the best comic book artist of all time, Wally didn’t live by the world’s rules, didn’t give a #$^ what people said about him, and was known to stay awake for days banging out drawings that would cause jaws to drop at first glance. Woodwork celebrates the life and work of Wally Wood; the best and baddest comic book artist that ever lived!

All Woodwork T-Shirts are limited edition and feature characters created by Wood for various product advertisements holding up the brand logo on the back hem.

Featuring main character Lester Finch, The Creeps Tee is made from 100% cotton and presents a strip from one of Wood’s more popular comics, Creepy, in 1976. “Muggers, addicts, beggars, winos, degenrates, perverts. An endless mob of… CREEPS.”

It could have been the constant headaches. Alcoholism, perhaps. Kidney failure, a stroke, the loss of vision in one eye… nevertheless, three self-inflicted gunshots in 1981 ended the life and career of heralded cartoonist, Wallace Wood.

Fast forward almost 30 years later and the art and influence that Wood left sketched into the minds of illustrators and cartoonists alike is unparalleled. The man inspired a generation of underground artists including luminaries Robert Crumb, Robert Williams and Art Spiegelman, left a major impact on graphically-charged movie posters, and now finds tribute in the world of street fashion.

New brand Woodwork has (legally – we swear) appropriated some of the more infamous, notorious works of Wood’s twisted, pained brilliance for a line of killer tees, resulting in vaguely familiar, yet never-seen-before prints that you may spend more time staring at than actually wearing.

Stay tuned for more madness from Woodwork in the coming weeks and seasons; with a career that spanned nearly four decades, there is enough material produced by Wood to make up for all of those bullshit, embarrassing Ed Hardy and Von Dutch garments tucked into the back corner of your closet.

Special thanks to Karmaloop’s Aimy Tsao for the bitchin’ blog graphics!

Click the Woodwork banner below to check out more from Woodwork.

One thing that’s rarely discussed beyond the point of a trivia question when one reminisces about Wally Wood is his pornography. The two invaluable full-length biographies gloss over it and I wasn’t even able to track down any information on the Internet where finding porn is NEVER hard to do! (I did, however, enjoy the “research!”)

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.