Wallace Wood Presents: Shattuck

Wallace Wood Presents Shattuck is a collection of old newspaper strips that appeared in the Overseas Weekly newspaper. Overseas Weekly was primarily aimed at an audience of young GIs during the Vietnam War. The issues also contained other strips, most notably Wood's Cannon and Sally Forth. Both of those were a head and shoulders above Shattuck, which will probably be of interest only to fans of Wood's work. Be advised, the strip was primarily drawn by other artists (principally Howard Chaykin, Jack Abel, Dave Cockrum, and Nicola Cuit, although Syd Shores and J. David Spurlock are also listed in the ending credits.) The strips was designed to be action filled, and as one other reviewer pointed out, contains a lot of female nudity and gunfighting. The writing is not very impressive, and Wood's inking of the other artists' pencils is very sparse. The last story arc is not complete, so the reader is left hanging, but there is a nice supplemental text detailing the history of the strip and telling a bit about Wood's work for Overseas Weekly. All things considered, I was certainly not disappointed with this book. It's handsomely done, and very reasonably priced. However, I would caution any potential buyers who are expecting a lot of Wood's artwork not to expect too much. In the final analysis, I can only go with three stars. If you're a fan of Wallace Wood, and want to collect his work, I'd certainly recommend Shattuck, but like much of his work from this period, it's strictly for Wally Wood fans only.

Not the best by Wally Wood, much of the art is by others.

WOOD is never anything but incredible. Nice exhuming of some obscure work.

This was short, rather abruptly so, but I enjoyed the ride. I would never say that this represents the best work of Wallace Wood, Dave Cockrum, or Howard Chaykin but it was a fun dose of machismo with some really great, humorous moments. I loved Wood's Cannon (which Fantagraphics also collected) and while that strip had a a much longer run, Shattuck is an interesting piece all on its own and, like Cannon, has more character development than you would expect from a men's only strip (but don't worry...plenty of sex, nudity, and violence).If I have any complaints it would be that the book is a half inch bigger on both sides than the previously released Cannon so they don't look like companion pieces on the shelf. Also, the story ends abruptly but not quite on a cliffhanger and mentally I could almost see it working where they left off even though I would have gladly taken more. And I would be remiss to not mention the uncomfortable sexism but I feel that's to be expected for a piece like this and if you took it away it wouldn't be the same for better or worse.

This comic strip is a very interesting piece of history for fans of Dave Cockrum and Wally Wood. Similar to Wood's Cannon strip, it features a lot of nudity and violence with a simplistic story line, but the art is really nice. The first few strips were by Howard Chaykin with Wood inking, but most of them were drawn by Cockrum and Jack Abel.The book design is attractive and it was printed directly from the original art,. You'll like this if you're a fan of these artists and comic book history in general.I'd recommend the following changes if this is ever reprinted:*It would have been nice to get more specific details on the artist credits. Many of the strips are unsigned and it's not always obvious who did what on the earlier strips.*Shattuck was considered "lost" for a long time and the original art only turned up recently. It would have been interesting to include a short backstory as to where the art was and how/when it turned up.*The 2 sentence entry for Dave Cockrum in the legacies section is a bit paltry considering his contributions to the field.All in all, it's great that this was finally reprinted and kudos to Fantagraphics and J. David Spurlock.

not enough

For the Wally Wood completest, but fun.

Fantagraphics puts out some really nice books. My admiration of their EC Library line and their treatment of old comic strips brought me to this book. Shattuck stands out as a really nice edition with a sewn hardcover binding and beautifully reprinted original art. Very happy I picked this up