Scoop Scuttle and His Pals: The Crackpot Comics of Basil Wolverton

Good

If you are a graphic comic artist this is a terrific collection to study. The characters and scenes are masterfully drawn and inked. The artist displays an exceptional skill at arranging scenes from multiple points of view, with a very cinematic attention to detail. This is the gold standard that later cartoonists aspired to. One can see the influence that Wolverton's cinematic sense of scene, action, framing and characters had on later greats such as Crumb, Lynch, Siergey and Williamson.The whimsical Scoop Scuttle plots aren't all that interesting to me, but the character drawings and composition of each frame are exceptional. I enjoyed the Mystic Moot and Big Bang Buster stories the most.As a footnote, the comic art from this period reflected a studied level of draftmanship that is rare these days. Artists from Wolverton's generation demonstrated very fine motor control, a skill that is rapidly vanishing as artists rely more and more on digital tools for rendering, thereby losing the dexterity that is required to draw like Wolverton.