Anyone buying one or more of the current US superheroes, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars or Judge Dredd part works might be interested in taking a look at what part-work magazines were like some eighty years ago.
Artist L Ashwell Wood is best known for the 600+ cutaways that he produced for Eagle comic between 1950 and 1969 however some of his last work published before his death in 1973 were cutaways in IPC’s World Of Wonder magazine, one of the sibling magazines to the better known Look and Learn. Steve Holland has been running a selection of pages from World Of Wonder over on his Bear Alley blog for some time now that include some of those cutaways.
However this wasn’t the first World Of Wonder magazine that L Ashwell Wood had contributed cutaways to.
At the very beginning of his career Wood’s first detailed cutaways were published in another World Of Wonder, a 52 issue part-work magazine that was originally published by IPC’s predecessor company Amalgamated Press between 1932 and 1933. It was the start of a very productive period in his life as he produced dozens of black and white cutaways for various AP part-works before moving over to Odhams Press where he began working in colour for the weekly Modern Wonder magazine.
downthetubes’ Jeremy Briggs has taken a look at this early World of Wonder work of L Ashwell Wood on Bear Alley and even managed to unearth an original preliminary pencil sketch for one of those 1933 cutaways. Readers will also discover, if they don’t already know, where the Bear Alley blog gets its name from.
Read “L Ashwell Wood’s Two Worlds of Wonder” on Bear Alley.
Bear Alley’s selection of pages from the 1970s version of World Of Wonder is here.
John Freeman
The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Star Trek Explorer (previously known as Star Trek Magazine) and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War and “Dan Dare”. He’s the writer of "Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies" for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Art and Illustration, British Comics, Magazines
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