Wally's World: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of the World's 2nd Best Comic Book Artist

Wally's World opens on Halloween night, 1981, in a seedy world of pornographers and drug addicts, with a mysterious death by 44 on the outskirts of Hollywood. The victim was Wallace Wood, a rebel genius of pop art and the artist who inspired underground cartoonists R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and countless others. Wood rose to the pinnacle of pop-culture fame as MAD's first star artist and as a cutting-edge science-fiction illustrator. But Wallace Wood had his demons. This dramatic cultural biography, packed with more than 150 of Wood's astounding, disturbing artworks, tells his story--and, in the process, the history of comic books from the Depression through the 1980s.