Heritage maintains offices in New York, Dallas, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Chicago, Palm Beach, London, Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Heritage Auctions is the largest fine art and collectibles auction house founded in the United States, and the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer.
Ever since it has been a hidden treasure, its existence, over time, almost mythological.Īnd now it comes to auction June 17 for the first time in decades and, just maybe, for the last time. And the original art has been in the same collection for the last 40 years, ever since it was acquired in Russ Cochran’s original EC auctions by one of the most discerning EC collectors.
Agents for Tower Comics.īut the cover to Shock SuspenStories was among his first masterpieces. For Topps, too, he created the Ugly Stickers in 1965, he co-created T.H.U.N.D.E.R. In coming years, of course, Wood would work for DC and Marvel, illustrating, most famously, Daredevil and Challengers of the Unknown. “This amazing piece of history stands as one of EC’s most potent images by their very top artist.”
“EC was far ahead of their time in terms of addressing such real-world themes, to the point that their comics were widely influential and liberating for the first generation of 1960s underground cartoonists, as well as the subject of an incredible amount of scholarship over the last 50 years,” says Heritage Vice President and Comic Art Specialist Todd Hignite. This was part of a much larger tale that asked the readers, by story’s end, “How long can we stay ‘cool’ and indifferent to this threat to our democratic way of life?” It was entertainment, yes, but also a potent statement by an artist ascending the mountaintop. Wood’s exterior work for this comic was far more than just another pre-Code bondage cover. “Under Cover,” about the Black Vigilante Society’s murder of a young woman for “consorting with that trash element” and the do-gooding reporter who witnessed the killing, was one such tale – a not-so-thinly veiled condemnation of the Klan. Shock SuspenStories, after all, was where EC’s creators were allowed to tell stories that mattered – stories that “do a lot of good for the American public,” as one reader put it in the letters to the editor in that very issue. In 2017’s essential book The Life and Legend of Wallace Wood, Thommy Burns writes that this final issue of the comic’s first year is “frankly breathtaking” as it “depicts a sheer-nightied pin-up girl kneeling before a whip-wielding, robed man.” This wasn’t typical fare for EC, then specializing in sci-fi and horror. As proof, the book itself is one of the most valuable and sought-after titles of the Golden Age, endlessly reproduced in hardback and soft-cover copies and cited whenever one needs proof comics were always about more than just strongmen in tights. All the titles in which Wood had a hand left their mark, but Shock SuspenStories No. It was produced by Wood at the most fertile period of his career, as he ascended from journeyman to legend, moving from comic-strip assistant to an illustrator of romance comics to a MAD man for Harvey Kurtzman to a creator of titles for Bill Gaines at EC in the 1950s. A perfect storm of creator and content: Wally Wood takes on the Ku Klux Klan!Īnd for the first time in four decades, this 1952 masterpiece heads to auction as one of the centerpieces of Heritage Auctions’ June 17-19 Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction. 6 is among the most famous images in the history of comics.īecause of its subject matter.
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