Wally Wood III

The Monsanto "Hairbag"

Woody did an advertisement for Monsanto in the mid-Sixties that included drawings of some of his critters. I believe that this is a study for one of them. It hangs on the wall of my cubicle at work. I scanned in the entire framed picture because, to tell you the truth, I'm not so sure that if I took it out of its frame it wouldn't disintegrate! The original was on the wall in Woody's studio for years, and you can see even from this scan how yellowed it became from his incessant smoking. Many of his originals are stained in this way. You can also see that it wasn't so much drawn as it was painted, and painted with ink wash and SnoPake, the opaque white-out Woody favored. It's more than a quarter of an inch thick in some places, and beginning to flake. Woody was the kind of guy who would grab whatever was at hand when he was working. If he didn't have any white paint, he'd use SnoPake. Still, it's a great little piece of work. I think Woody had a line as facile and expressive as any Japanese ukiyo-e painter, although to my knowledge he had no interest in that form of art. Come to think of it, he didn't show much interest in any form of visual art aside from comic books.