Wally Wood: T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents Artists Edition Portfolio Review

Master of The Fantastic

♦Tripwire’s Senior Editor Andrew Colman takes a look at IDW’s Wally Wood: T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents Artists Edition Portfolio…

Wally Wood

Tower Comics, an imprint which lasted from 1965 to 1969, was an outlier in what was an era dominated by Marvel Comics, and consequently, despite the occasional brief revival, remains an overlooked publisher. Partly due to the big two’s stranglehold on the market in that pivotal decade, as well as its rather infrequent output, its lead title, T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents, looks oddly out of kilter with its contemporaries. As a series, it’s far more akin to an episodic newspaper strip spliced with E.C.’s New Direction titles than the garish, self-important swagger of mid-60s comics. Dynamo, its lead character and star of this portfolio of original art, is very much the stolid monolith of Bond and Man From U.N.C.L.E. archetypes, with maybe a little Challengers Of The Unknown thrown in – a super-agent, who together with other characters who exhibit ever more weird powers, forms the eponymous super-team.

Tower Comics’ titles (Thunder Agents, Dynamo, Noman, Undersea Agent), are a strangely classicist read, with 1950s sci-fi tropes and little in the way of characterization (the emphasis is firmly on the plots, which feature earth-endangering mad scientists, robots, dinosaurs and doppelganger nemeses). It’s still a fascinating diversion, if only to experience what comics would’ve been like if Marvel hadn’t revolutionised the industry – a generic yet visually appealing group of books that, like Gold Key and Archie’s offerings, were left in the slipstream.

If there’s one key feature, of course, it’s the expertly rendered artwork of Wally Wood, an artist who illustrated the odd book for Marvel and DC in his post-E.C. career, but nothing compared to his efforts here. IDW’s coffee table sized portfolio may not have complete stories as before, but still has some wonderfully reproduced pin-ups, splashes and story pages taken from original art to entrance – once again, this is the ideal format to enjoy period comic art, and none more so than from virtuoso talent such as Wally Wood, whose fine line and use of light and shadow is exemplary, and better, needless to say, in black and white. The splash pages and covers are especially iconic, with Wood’s remarkably disciplined pencils still as beguiling as his more surreal or fantasy works. Kudos to Scott Dunbier and the IDW team for another quality collection featuring original art that, these days, is somewhat out of reach for most collectors – we look forward to the next instalment.

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