July 9 is the birthday of illustrator BASIL WOLVERTON (1909-1978).

Wolverton was one of the great horror and science fiction comic book artists, but he's probably more famous for his work for MAD magazine. He became known for meticulously drawn grotesques, faces warped, exaggerated, or oddly endearing in their distortion. He even leaned into the joke with the self‑applied title “Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People who Prowl this Perplexing Planet,” a line that captures both his precision and his dry humor. In 1941, he was baptized into Herbert W. Armstrong's Radio Church of God and eventually illustrated a Bible for the church. See illustrations below. Contemporary cartoonists Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman are both admirers of Wolverton‘s art.

Basil Wolverton - Drowning sinners trying to claw their way on to the ark

Basil Wolverton - Original caption from The Plain Truth, Oct. 1954: “Look at these pathetic faces! Famines and epidemics, next to sweep the earth (Rev. 6:5-8), will grow rapidly worse following atomic warfare. Bombings will render vast areas incapable of food production. With no transportation systems, hordes of people will have little or nothing to eat. Even rats will be prize catches. Some wretched souls will even turn to cannibalism!”

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