Basil Wolverton's CULTURE CORNER: grotesque HOWTOs from MAD Magazine's gross-out king

By Cory Doctorow at 7:50 am Wednesday, Jul 7

Fantagraphics has done the world the great service of reprinting Basil Wolverton's Culture Corner, a series of satirical and grotesque HOWTO strips that ran in Fawcett's Whiz Comics (best known as the home of Captain Marvel) from 1947 to 1952. The book includes every known strip, along with the (sometimes even weirder) pencil sketches where those exist.

Wolverton is best known as the gross-out master of MAD Magazine's golden age (and as the deeply religious Christian who drew his own horrific illustrated Old Testament), and these strips will delight any Wolverton fan with their characteristic doggerel, gratuiotous violence, and slapstick humor that pokes fun at the American self-improvement genre.

These strips all seem to be in the public domain and can be read for free through Dinosaur Gardens. But the Fantagraphics edition is well worth the price: it's a handsomely bound item, augmented with the sketches and a nice essay by Wolverton's son.

Basil Wolverton's Culture Corner

Distortions in the scan below are my fault -- it's page-curl from my scanner-glass; they look great in real life -Cory