A terrific series of photographs of the USS Macon’s construction, ca. 1932 – at How to be a Retronaut.

There’s an unusual amount of activity on the Wally Wood retrospective front, with collections coming soon from both Vanguard and IDW. This pleases me. I’ve always felt that Wood wasn’t valued highly enough and now there’ll be hundreds and hundreds of pages on the bookstore shelves to show everybody why I think so.

Vanguard’s all color Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction was originally announced with 136 pages of Wood’s EC-era science fiction comics stories: but in a last minute expansion that page count has now been raised to 208 (count ’em! 208!) pages.

That’s a lot of Wally Wood in there.

According to Vanguard, much of the new content is Wood’s complete science fiction work for Avon, the paperback publisher whose comics arm was a competitor with EC Comics up to the mid-1950’s with titles like Strange Worlds and Out of This World Adventures.

One of the many things to look forward to, then, is that this collection will include not only the EC Comics stories, but an even larger amount of the work Wood’s best remembered for – his science fiction comics stories from the 1950s. And while sentences like that infuriated Wood later in his life… well, it’s true. That is the work he’s best remembered for. But it may still act as a gateway drug to get you all to look at the wonderful work he did later on in his life.

I was thinking a lot about Wood last week while I was lighting a couple of scenes. His inking was powerful and unique; his body of work has a lot to offer to anyone who makes pictures.

Folks – especially on the Internet – tend to repeat some of Wood’s most sarcastic comments like Never draw what you can copy; never copy what you can trace; never trace what you can photostat and paste down. Most of these came about when Wood was a disappointed and angry man, and because they’re a direct reversal of what he did in this work from the 1950’s I see them as instructions he was drumming into his own brain – because they were in fact at odds with his nature.

Wally Wood tried to reform himself into a hack because he’d been so frustrated by being the artist he started out to be. That’s one of the reasons why Wood makes us sad. These hundreds of pages, from a time before he’d beaten his head bloody against his own career, are the reasons why he should make us happy.

Over at io9 Natalie Baaklini continues her series of articles about the science fiction pulp magazines and their art, this time covering the years of 1930-1949 before spilling over to the paperbacks of the 1950s. (Part One, if you missed it, is here.)

There’s a great collection of cover images (with credits, happily) and even a link to the web site of one of the still-practicing artists. Expect some analysis, though nothing too artsy, as an old friend of mine might say ("But some of my best friends are artsy people!") and anyhow an aesthetic and philosophical analysis of women being lowered into giant test tubes has got to beat most kinds of analysis you can find.

I tried to Google the author for some background but the only thing I discovered is that there are a bunch of Natalie Baaklinis, which surprised me just as much as finding out how many people share my own unlikely name. So whichever Natalie you are, keep it up. Nice stuff.

Wonderputt is a beautiful little in-browser miniature golf game from Damp Gnat. The course is pretty neat when you first see it… but be ready to watch it transmogrify itself as you go from hole to hole, working up to the point where you can launch the silvery retro rocket at the very end.

Wonderfully fun! … via Super Punch.

Today’s the debut of The Mercury Men, that long-awaited retro science fiction web serial that’s found its home at syfy (sic).

Synopsis: Edward Borman becomes trapped when deadly creatures from the planet Mercury overrun his office building, killing anyone in their path.

That happened to me once, too, except that they turned out to be FBI agents.

It looks like the next episode is slated for tomorrow; so, viewers, don’t change that channel!

Here’s a compilation video from Manuel Velasco featuring more (uncredited) depictions of Thor’s Hammer, in just about every possible medium, than you can shake a goat-drawn chariot at. My version shows up at 7:10, followed by someone’s rather crude copy of it. At 4:41 you can also see some brave fellow’s back where my Mjolnir has become a very large tattoo.

At least Velasco’s blog post links back to me; but feel for all those artists and craftspeople whose work is there to be enjoyed, but not known.

The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9 is Jake Armstrong‘s thesis film from 2009: it’s a darkly humorous science fiction misadventure. There are just so many things I could say about it, but I shouldn’t say any of them till you’ve seen it. And I can’t tell whether you’ve seen it; therefore, I say nothing at all.

Armstrong is a cartoonist and animator based in New York whose name makes it pretty much inevitable that he’ll draw spacemen. I mean, Jake Armstrong? What else could he do?

Oh, well, plenty. But you know what I mean.

via TOR.com.

Made as the filmmakers’ final project at the Utrecht School of the Arts, Blik is a story told entirely without dialogue and – because the characters’ faces lack any features – without the use of any expressions at all. The whole thing is done with an exacting use of body language and as challenging a prospect as that is, these folks (now at Polder Animation) pull it off brilliantly.

There’s something very pleasant about their combination of watercolor-like rendering and their use of light, shadow, and – at one point – rain. Very nice work!