A True Revelation

The Wolverton Bible is engaging as a book related to comics, if not consistently as a comic itself. Drawn and captioned by Basil Wolverton, an artist who rose to prominence bringing life to disgusting and outlandish concepts for Mad, among other clients, The Wolverton Bible feels like a beloved band’s b-sides or demos, a part of the catalog not as well known but containing some of the most successful pieces of art. Though not traditionally a comic – the illustrations are paired with captions but feature little in the way of sequential order – The Wolverton Bible exudes comic style.

Each illustration feels like a panel ripped from a laboriously created alternative comic. Expressions exaggerate freely, villains look poised to tie a maiden to a train track, and the women wouldn’t look incongruous in a line-up next to the Golden Age Lois Lane. The men, with the exception of Adam and David, aren’t overly pretty – crosshatching and stippling cover their forms, and their faces are often plumped and squished like fruit. As is often the case when a younger reader looks through the work of a much older creator, I couldn’t help but compare him to artists who came much later. Constantly at the forefront of my mind was Howard Cruse, the cartoonist behind the seminal gay civil-rights-era comic Stuck Rubber Baby. Cruse’s style, if not inspired by Wolverton, is an astonishing case of coincidental influence – Cruse must have, like Wolverton, used countless pools of ink stippling and cross-hatching his very un-glamorized figures. Both artists’ figures have a softness about them that is almost always absent from mainstream comics, where all figures must be toned and solid. Cruse’s figures, like Wolverton’s, possess the ability to look utterly cartooned and yet very true to life.

Not all of Wolverton’s work for the Worldwide Church of God was successful for me as a reader. When Wolverton shifted from full pages to smaller scenes, some of his techniques became very repetitive. After the third or fourth time, I became very unimpressed with the use of distant shots of crowds walking through desert landscapes, seen on pages 115, 176, 210, 252, and many more. I also picked up on, though was less disappointed with, the many times he used distant shots with animals framed in the close foreground, visible on several of the pages just mentioned. There were also several uses of very close busts of characters displaying emotions like slyness that, while I feel like they definitely captured with very subtle tones in the text, would have benefited from more context in a larger image. I did, however, love the many times Wolverton rendered odd, angular, and otherworldly pagan idols, as well as the white-hot fury of lightning and fire.

The most successful work in this volume, in my opinion, comes when Wolverton is able to play most wildly. The initial chapters of Genesis, with their otherworldly happenings, and the apocalyptic Revelations, with its modern-day horror, were my favorites in the volume. The storytelling along in many of these images, including the birth of Adam on pg. 21, the hand of God coming down to the Ark on pg. 39, and the pure pandemonium on pgs. 269 and 272, accomplish in single images what many stories fail to do with much more space. The Wolverton Bible is absolutely not a comic book, but it couldn’t exist without the medium, and it shows its influences as prominently – if not more so – as its gospel. While it is perhaps lamentable that Wolverton couldn’t craft these stories as full sequential stories, it’s easy to see why he regarded this as some of his best and most memorable work.