The Wolverton Bible
Basil Wolverton created the most famous MAD magazine cover, the May 1954 “Beautiful Girl of the Month—Reads ‘MAD.’” Ludicrously grotesque, it’s typical of the humorous cartooning that was Wolverton’s principal livelihood. Humor wasn’t the self-taught artist’s only mode, however. From 1952 to 1974, he illustrated the Bible for publications of the Radio (later Worldwide) Church of God, a broadcast-based ministry whose eccentric beliefs crop up in the drawings. His son Monte prepared this complete collection of his church-related work, including some typically funny stuff done for the student publications of the church’s Bible schools. Wolverton used a lot of contrasting pattern work to compensate for his essentially stiff, flat, untutored style, meticulously filling in fields of dots, lines, and, after he upgraded his pens, hatchwork. Wolverton’s faces have only a handful of types and expressions, and he couldn’t do foreshortening. His Book of Revelation drawings, full of grotesque horror, are more impressive than the others; but altogether his religious art demonstrates that he was kind of the Douanier Rousseau, the Grandma Moses, of comics. --Ray Olson