Wallace Wood Presents Shattuck (graphic novel review).
When I was reading Wallace Wood’s ‘Cannon’, I came across a reference to his western strip ‘Shattuck’ and thought I ought to give it a look. Woody did the layouts with Nick Cuti and the biggest surprise, novices Dave Cockrum, Howard Chaykin and inkers Jack Abel and Syd Shores working from them.
Oddly, it cuts off there as at the end of the book, editor Dave Spurlock says Woody wanted to move on in mid-stream. Like with ‘Cannon’ and ‘Sally Forth’, the strips were designed to keep the US military troops abroad happy in ‘The Overseas Weekly’, affectionately called ‘The Oversexed Weekly’ back in the early 1970s.
There are some comparisons in all three with women continually losing their clothes and a randy lead and very popular with the troops. The stories did well with the setting.
Merle Shuttuck is an ambidextrous cowboy sharpshooter roaming from adventure to adventure, looking for a quiet life but getting dragged into all sorts of problems and even becomes a sheriff for a while. The western background doesn’t appear to be based on American western films and there’s certainly no Native Americans. The sexual element of the cathouses that frequented that time period certainly shakes things up enough to make it look a little more like how it probably was.
In an interesting way, if you’re a fan of Wood, Chaykin or Cockrum in any combination, that you have something that you might well have missed otherwise. The art is graphic, violent and tasteful for its time period and I only wish Woody had wanted to complete a third section. Even so, the art and scripts make for a fascinating read.
GF Willmetts
April 2020
Get in in the UK from https://amzn.to/2RWGKVQ
Get it in the USA from https://amzn.to/2Vn2pZv
(pub: Fantagraphics Books Inc., 2016. 72 page oblong hardback. I pulled my copy for £21.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-60699-914-1)
check out website: www.fantagraphics.com
